Chromatography Forum

I want to turn off gc ms devices at certain times (8-9 hours) to save energy. How can I apply this without damaging the colon and device? There are 30 gc ms in the laboratory where we work. most of them actively wait for 1-2 days and spend high energy. How can I find a viable method?

thank you for your help

I don't see how. When you start them again, you'll have to pump it down, get out all of the air and water, then maybe in 2-3 hours it'll be ready to run. That doesn't seem practical to me. A MS is not like a flame. Flames stabilize quickly after they are lit. MS's take time to get stabilized. They work much better when they are on all of the time.

If you have instruments sitting around, waiting for that length of time, can you run the methods on some instruments on others so that the "others" run closer to full time? Then, you can completely decommission some instruments so that they're never on - unless you want to revive them.

You can use switching valves to flow nitrogen or hydrogen carrier and save some money that way, not having to use helium all the time.

You can also turn down the temperatures on the oven and inlet of the GC, but I would leave the temperatures of the MS at normal levels including the AUX interface temperature. Otherwise as above, you will need to wait for the MS to come to thermal stability before it is ready to run accurate quantitative work.

When you pump down it gives the warning to wait 2 hours, but I have found that 24 hours is more accurate if you want real stability for anything more than just qualatative scans.