By Anonymous on Tuesday, June 22, 2004 - 11:19 am:

Hi-
Can someone tell me if it will damage my column to inject 1ul water onto a 30m x 0.53 mm x 1um column? i can't find any info in the mfr catalog. Thanks in advance.
-A.Non

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By Anonymous on Tuesday, June 22, 2004 - 11:38 am:

OK

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By ingochrist on Wednesday, June 23, 2004 - 10:21 am:

You can inject water, but your column lifetime is greatly reduced. I would recommend using an extraction technique such as SPME or the lesser expensive technique SDME (Single Drop Microextraction) as described the this months LC/GC mag.

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By Jason Ellis on Wednesday, June 23, 2004 - 02:50 pm:

Water will not damage the HP-5 in any way. Bonded and crosslinked columns will tolerate water injections without any phase damage. Where people run into problems is with inorganic material often contained in the water (salts or inorganic acids/bases). Inorganic salts will contaminate the column and inorganic acids/bases will do phase damage. But the water itself is fine.

If you'd like more info, please feel free to contact me directly (replace the "at" with an "@" in my email address). I have a presentation I can send you that shows performance of various columns after about 1000 or 1500 injections.

Jason Ellis
Tech Support
Agilent Technologies

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By Anonymous on Wednesday, June 23, 2004 - 05:46 pm:

ingochrist and Jason Ellis-

Thanks for your responses. I've done several (~50) injections so far and have seen no ill effects. I was concerned about increasing peak tailing or stripping of the bonded phase but the HP-5 column has perfomed very well so far. FYI, I'm using 18 megaohm water so there should be very little inorganics. Thanks again.
-A.Non

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By ingochrist on Tuesday, June 29, 2004 - 08:28 am:

Whenever I had too much water in my analysis it appeared to have a reduced column lifetime. But hey, he is with Agilent and might know things I don't know. I will ask for his app note.