Merry XMAS Everyone!
We have a Bruker AV-500 here where the defualt mode of access is via
ICON-NMR and a CASE sample changer. For those of you unfamiliar with this
equipment, the CASE is not a robot but rather changes samples 1 position at
a time in a serial fashion. The system works extremely well. We have had
some unhappy users lately and these users are chemists dealing with reactive
or otherwise difficult samples. Tubes with J-Young valves are not allowed to
be used in the CASE. What these chemists are doing is placing "dummy
samples" in the queue to hold their position and sometime before it's time
for their sample to drop in the magnet, they revisit the NMR center to
replace the dummy sample with the "real sample". This system has many
sources of problems including a sample in an earlier spot failing to lock or
shim, someone adding more experiments to an earlier sample, etc etc.
Typically these real samples are simply standard NMR tubes and caps wrapped
with a bit of teflon tape. I should emphasize that the spectrometer can also
be accessed via a hands-on booking and this is what I am selling to them but
these chemists would rather use the sample changer given that convenience
factor, although they are being inconvenienced at the same time by having to
constantly monitor the timing of the queue.
I'd love to get some feedback from this group on this issue. For those of
you with sample changers, I'm sure you must have faced similar issues. What
types of solutions, if any, have you implemented to allow researchers with
reactive, time sensitive samples to be able to still use the sample changer?
I'll post a summary of course if there's interest.
Thanks,
Mike
"Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody
else has thought" - Albert Szent Gyorgi
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Michael D. Lumsden, Ph.D.
NMR Facility Coordinator
Room 428, Atlantic Region Magnetic Resonance Centre
Department of Chemistry, Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
B3H 4J3
phone: 902-494-1635
FAX: 902-494-1310
http://armrc.chemistry.dal.ca
Received on Thu Dec 21 2006 - 21:35:55 MST