Frederick F. Spaziani Memorial Award 2013

Frederick F. Spaziani Memorial Award 2013

RECOGNITION DAY

The Frederick F. Spaziani Memorial Award 2013 scholarship is awarded by a Suffolk University faculty committee to one full-time and one part-time student in the Chemistry, Physics and/or Engineering program on the basis of merit. 

2013 awardees are both on the Astrophysics Track: Casey Myers and Elizabeth Rodriguez.  Jack Driscoll will be there to award Casey and Elizabeth tonight, April 25, 2013 at the C. Walsh Theatre.

 

Prashant Sharma, Chair Physics Dept at Suffolk U, Casey Myers, 2013 Spaziani Memorial Award recipient and Jack Driscoll, Spaziani Memorial Award Administrator. 



Both award recipients submitted essays that illustrated their creative use of physics.

Casey employed some culinary physics to save prep time while working as a pizza chef in high school. "Everything we see around us in the natural world can be explained using physics. Physics is my passion because the world is my event, and I will always ask the question why".

This is the second consecutive year that Elizabeth is a Spaziani award recipient. Elizabeth's essay details her experience as a Suffolk University teaching assistant who developed curriculum and led an astrophysics field trip for non-science majors to the Suffolk University Maine Campus Friedman Field Station. In her words: "In the end, most of the students were able to find most of the objects on the list by using all of the equipment and trying to be creative with the telescopes in order to achieve this". 

Congratulations to Casey and Elizabeth! We are honored to present each of you with the 2013 Spaziani Memorial Award. 

Fred Spaziani co-founded of  HNU Systems, Inc. with Jack Driscoll in 1973. Together they developed the first commercial photoionization detector that is now the most important method for measuring volatile organic compounds. Fred left us at too early an age and the award is to help students in science or engineering reach their full potential.

Sensitivity matters

Updated blog post: April 16, 2014

Jack Driscoll and Fred Spaziani: the founding fathers of HNU Systems, Inc. applied the photoionization detector to gas chromatography in 1976. Having borrowed a Tracor GC equipped with a Flame Ionization Detector and utilizing Fred's uncanny mechanical engineering skills, they built a crude version of the PID modeled after the portable PID they had introduced to the industrial hygiene market in 1974 and modified the detector to run on the Tracor. The purpose of this exercise was to develop a sensitive detector for hydrocarbons. What they had not expected to find was that their PID was fifty times more sensitive than the FID for aromatic hydrocarbons! 

The HNU PID is one of the most sensitive detectors available for VOC’s. It has the widest dynamic range of any detector available and does not require any support gases except the carrier.

The photoionization detector (PID) is used for the measurement of low (ppb) organic and inorganic species that can be ionized by the UV lamp (9.5, 10.6 and 11.7). Nearly 20,000 of these detectors have been sold worldwide since it was first released by HNU Systems in 1976. It has been used for the measurement of VOC’s in water (EPA method 602, EPA Method 50--, EPA Method SW846…, numerous OSHA methods), quality control.

There are two Models that are described below:

• The Model PI52 has a PID, a power supply for the lamp and bias and an electrometer. The electrometer output is 0-10 VDC. The customer needs a separate ADC channel to feed the signal into the GC’s data system. Alternately, PID Analyzers sells a data system (Model 50) that will feed the signal into a separate PC.


• The Model PI51 has a PID and a power supply for the lamp and bias. Here, the customer uses the electrometer (FID type with a positive bias) already in the Gas chromatograph. This should already have the ADC connection to the customer GC data system.

Driscoll published a paper in 1978 on the work with Spaziani (1976) described above. Although it is over thirty years old, the analytical technique remains relevant today. In fact, we will be presenting a modernized version with the PID/FID coupling on the fast GC at the American Chemical Society Fall National Meeting in August 2012 in Philadelphia.

Monitoring and identification of hazardous air pollutants by fast capillar… from Jennifer Maclachlan