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Re: DIY scientific equipment

Posted: Thu Mar 14, 2019 6:07 pm
by ChristofferBR
I hold chromatography as a hobby besides my career in synthetic chemistry.

Currently I'm building a completely from-scratch GC.
Complete with DIY:
-Injector (septum under a 1/8" swagelok Tee nut works great!)
-packed columns
-solid support/phases
-4-element TCD (made from 1/8 tee's)

Current development work is on:
-micropacked columns
-DIY megabore PLOT columns
-Corona discharge ionization detector

As it stands now it gives baseline sep. of propane, isobutane and butane on 50 cm packed column (paraffin on alumina support). Quite happy with that :)

Only original parts are septa and carrier flow control.

Re: DIY scientific equipment

Posted: Fri Mar 15, 2019 7:55 am
by bunnahabhain
Back in the late 1990s/early 2000s our Pharmacia FPLC controllers at university died (electronics). There was no replacement available from GE Healthcare, because they wanted to promote their Äkta systems. So we hired a student who connected two pumps to a NI interface card and wrote a controller program for gradient generation / flow rate control using two of these pumps. As I moved house last week, I found the backup CD with this program :)
Sadly, I lost contact with my lab colleagues from these days, but I guess the pump system is still running for protein purification.

Re: DIY scientific equipment

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2023 1:11 pm
by ndemarco
bunnahabhain wrote:
Back in the late 1990s/early 2000s our Pharmacia FPLC controllers at university died (electronics). There was no replacement available from GE Healthcare, because they wanted to promote their Äkta systems. So we hired a student who connected two pumps to a NI interface card and wrote a controller program for gradient generation / flow rate control using two of these pumps. As I moved house last week, I found the backup CD with this program :)
Sadly, I lost contact with my lab colleagues from these days, but I guess the pump system is still running for protein purification.


Would you be so kind to send me the program? I'm creating a Python library to control these old LKB Bromma / Pharmacia pumps, like the 2250. I'd be interested to see the implementation.