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- Posts: 2
- Joined: Sat Apr 18, 2020 9:18 pm
first time poster here. So our lab is stuck in quite the predicament. There is definitely something wrong with our Agilent 1260 system, specifically the degasser. The reason why i'm saying that is today I disconnected the inlet/outlet in/from the degasser and the liquid which came out and absorbed on my paper left brown/reddish stains. If I keep the system running on 50/50 methanol/acetonitrile the pressure constantly rises until the autosampler in-line filter completely clogs up with the very same brown/reddish material. Pump is a G7104C quat pump from Agilent, the degasser is an integrated one, which makes it even more difficult for me to pick it apart.
My only ideas would be some sort of bacterial contamination or that some plastic material inside the degasser has desolved and is causing me all the trouble. I doubt the second option though, as I checked what the manual says about what polymers the degasser is made of and no solvent would be able to cause damage to such materials (Teflon AF, FEP, PFA, ETFE). Only thing I could consider harmful would be fluorinated ion pairing reagents as HFBA/TFA that were ran on that system (up to 0,3 and 0,1% respectfully) although that really can't do such amount of damage. Colleague of mine also ran diethylamine/triethylamine/ammonia in his experiments as mobile phase additives but I doubt once more that could have done this much harm.
Apart from that the pump is fully functional, no issues whatsoever concerning leaks and further more. Everything that was ran on that system in the past year was water soluble. Buffers are out of the question, last time a buffer was used there was November.
I'd be more than happy if anyone could point me in the right direction, any help is highly appreciated.