Chromatography Forum

We are preparing to put together a new lab with more space and it occurred to our team that it might be a good time to consider taking the opportunity to mitigate the noise from our two Edwards pumps - we use a 1.5 and a larger 18. I recall walking into a lab about a decade ago with multiple instruments and hearing minimal noise and it seems I might have an opportunity to finally get rid of the constant pump racket.

Are there other options besides the Quiet Covers from Agilent I see online or is this the best option for addressing this?

We have on LCMSMS that is on and Ion Bench which has an enclosed space for vacuum pumps with a spring loaded platform to reduce the vibration of the pump being transferred to the bench. The enclosed portion has what looks like egg crate foam on the walls and 4 large PC fans in the back, two blowing in and two blowing out to keep it cool. We have been using it about a year now and the pump stays cool enough you can touch it and there is barely any noise.

These benches are very expensive, but the enclosure could be built for not too much money I would imagine.

We have the equivalent for our GC/MS systems. One key point is to keep the fans on in the event of a power failure, i.e. the fans must be on back up power if the mass specs are.
Otherwise heat death in a power failure.
The Pfeiffers that come with Agilent mass specs are especially prone to overheating.

if you're in a situation of incredible luxury, able to design your own lab, I saw a clever option in a Thermo demo lab a long time ago. It was a large open-plan office-type room, and into it, Thermo had built long, slim corridor-partitions. They were one door-width, with an access door at the end, and the instruments were all set up against the walls of these partitions, either side, with the vac-pumps (and nitrogen generators I think) inside the partitioned-off "corridor". It kept all the noisy stuff separate from the gorgeous sales/demo area, and the corridor could be ventilated in whatever way you want; Thermo's landed up against an external wall.
But vacuum tubing cannot be more than a certain length, so you really do need the instrument fairly close to the wall, which probably isn't ideal for maintenance!

Thanks for all of the replies - there are some interesting options. The Ion Benches look nice but we won't need to have mobility and other options that they bring. The walled off area is something I will mention but with only two or maybe someday three pumps I don't think that would be agreed to.

The Quiet Covers from Agilent look like they will do the job. I'll just need to account for the needed empty space below the counters that will hold the instruments so that they won't take up floor space - looks like they lower the noise about 10 decibals - doesn't sound like a lot but I'll take it

Edit - Actually I just saw that Agilent has oil free pumps that are marketed as being quiet to begin with - I'll be looking into those as well as an option

there are different sorts of oil-free pumps. There are the scroll pump variety that make a different sort of mess when they do have to be serviced, and there are also some amazing pumps out there that I've recently seen advertised, that boast that they have no touching parts whatsoever (how??) and therefore don't wear and need almost no maintenance, as well as being ridiculously quiet. Ah, just found a link:

https://www.leyboldproducts.com/product ... ry-65-plus

I don't work for Leybold and haven't seen one of these pumps, so I have no axe to grind, but no idea whether they're as good as they claim. I did try to find out how a vacuum pump can work without having any touching parts, but the answer seemed to be "sophisticated German engineering". Which probably means it works.

Don't recall where I read it but oil free scroll pumps do not have the ultimate vacuum flow specs to back up a GC-MS.

We use the enclosures from MS Noise for the pumps in our lab. We're pretty satisfied with their performance and have them on most of our rough pumps (and also on the chiller of our Orbitrap Elite). I believe they're related to Ion Bench as our one system on an Ion Bench has similar noise mitigation features as our MS Noise enclosures.