Chemistry at the Haute Ecole Valaisanne: Recent Developments in the Analytical Field

FH–HES

Abstract

The major activities of our competence centre 'Process engineering', which groups together the two fields of study, Chemistry and Food & Biotechnology, are applied research and development (aR&D) as well as technology transfer. Two years ago the analytical orientation of the Chemistry Department was reinforced in Sion.
We would like to present two recent developments at our competence centre. The first one deals with a quality control method for wine corks which reduces the risk of altering the wine by the unwanted flavour of musty taint, commonly called 'cork taint'. The goal of this development was to set up a sensitive and selective analytical method at the ppt level for chloroanisoles that is sufficiently cheap and rapid for routine tests. The second item presented here is the development of an instrument for fast analysis of the global volatile contents (TV9000).