Benefits of Automated Sample Pre-treatment

Wet Chemistry Automation
Oral Presentation

Prepared by A. Yates
Skalar, Inc., 5012 Bristol Industrial Way, Suite 107, Buford, GA, 30518, United States


Contact Information: al.yates@skalar-us.com; 716-529-0707

ABSTRACT

In today’s drinking and waste water laboratories there is a great demand to not only have the time and staff to do all that is asked, but also perform the tasks in compliance with state and federal agencies. For many of these labs they are seeing the cost of labor rise and the lack of applicants who have the skills to do what is asked. According to EPA’s Code of Federal Regulations, samples are required to be treated to remove environmental interferences to include digestion, distillation or filtration prior to analysis. These sample pre-treatments add many man hours to each test and some of them create safety concerns for the analyst, not to mention the cost of hazardous waste disposal.
We at Skalar have spent countless hours over the past 20 years developing and perfecting many methods to perform inline sample pre-treatment on our segmented flow analyzer without compromising data integrity or detection limits; if anything, we have improved both of those key components of analysis. This presentation will present to the audience the current day-to-day challenges of analysis, inline treatment solutions, detection limit improvements, and additional alternative automated solutions to help with safety and time savings.