How to perform BFB Tune?

[Lyne]

Does anyone knows how to perform a bromofluorobenzene (BFB) tune?

I noticed that Agilent chemstation has a BFB.u tune file. Can the instrument be tuned automatically by just clicking "BFB tune"?

I tried the following procedures provided by a GCMS practical handbook by Wiley interscience, but I got stucked halfway. These are the instructions from the handbook:

To run a bromofluorobenzene tune for volatile organics analysis, set you GC oven to 230 degrees. Open the cal gas valve and run a target tune or ramp your entrance lens so that 131 and 219 are nearly equal, but slightly favouring 131. Ideal conditions are 69 (100%), 131(35%), 219 ( 30%), 414 (1-2%), and 502 ( 0.8%). Tweak the last two masses with your amu offset and the EM emission. Save tune parameters. Close the cal gas valve.

Shoot 50ng of BFB solution. You should get a single peak at about 17.5 min on the chromatographic display shows a spectrum and a pass/fail tune report for BFB.

What I did was I set my GC oven at 230 degrees Celsius. After autotuning, I open the manual tune window, go to more parameters, change the masses to 69, 131 and 219. I close that window and was at the manual tune window with all the different parameter values again. I click on entrance lens value and changed it, click ramp on the manual tune window. After doing so, I do a scan to see if my 131 and 219 are about the same abundance. They could not reach the ideal percentage as stated. But roughly around 47% for both. I tried to vary amu offset and EM volts, but the percentage for 414 and 502 did not vary much, constantly around 3%, so I just took the autotune value for both. I close gas valve and save the tune parameters as a new file. I manually inject 50ng of BFB, but then I realise that the system did not automatically generate the BFB tune report with the target masses, rel. to mass, lower limit %, upper limit %, Rel abundance, Raw abundance, Result pass/fail. What I don't understand is how can the BFB peak be shown on the chromatographic display when I am not even doing a run. Do I need to run BFB using an temperature gradient? How do I generate a BFB tune report??

I don't know if I am doing this correctly or not. Please correct me. Thank you!!

[aldehyde]

Hi, this document may be of help: http://www.chem.agilent.com/Library/Sup ... f05011.pdf

[Lyne]

Hi Aldehyde,

Thanks for the BFB tuning application note!

The author mentioned about Agilent G1701CA EnviroQuant Chemstation software. I do not have this software. Is it still possible to do a BFB tune and generate a BFB Tune evaluation report with the normal chemstation?

I tried doing the modified autotune mentioned in the note (Page 6 to 9) and I managed to obtained BFB1. U. The next step requires an injection of BFB and evaluating the tune file that I have created using EnviroQuant. Is there another procedure that I could use to replace EnviroQuant? Or is it necessary that I purchased the software?

[aldehyde]

You should be able to do a BFB tune on any hardware, the special reporting may require an additional software package--I am not an expert on environmental applications but I have worked with several people using BFB tune and other environmental packages.

If you look at the header of your chemstation window does it say "enhanced"? If you close chemstation, open the configuration editor (either on the desktop or in the start menu under chemstation) and then select your instrument and edit the config. At the bottom of the config window is a drop down box that lets you select between a few different configurations. Most commonly people are using enhanced mode, but you should probably turn on environmental or enviroquant (I can't remember off the top of my head what its called). Let me know!

[Bigbear]

What instrument are you using? If an Agilent 5973 or 75 you can just run the bfb tune in the tune window then have your method use that tune.
I however am not so lucky my 73 prefers a manual tune. There is one that a few folks at Agilent are working on they refer to it as the ramped emission tune. In short it goes like this.
Run an AT save it and save it also to a different name ( something that applies to your method. I use 534_MM_DD_YY)
Set the ion foccus to 140. scan 69, 219, and 50. Mess with IF until 50/69 ratio is about 08-0.9% ( my instrument likes 1%).
then set the ions 69,219, and 502 and ramp the emission current. When done set the cursor to the maxima of the 3 plots ( you may end up either increasing or decreasing the current)
Then scan 69, 219, and 131. Mess with the entrance lens and offset to get 219 and 131 about equal and between 40-50% of 69. On my instrument 219 is higher than 131.
The last step is to up the detector voltage to get about 600000 counts for 69. Save it and set your method to use this tune.
It should work for you. If the 176/174 ratios are off go back and adjust the 219 and 131 ratios.

Good luck

[X]

Is you data analysis window enhanced data analysis instead of environmental data analysis?
If so, you need type: enhanced 1 in the bar and the window should change to environmental, then you can evaluate your BFB tune.

Hi Aldehyde,

Thanks for the BFB tuning application note!

The author mentioned about Agilent G1701CA EnviroQuant Chemstation software. I do not have this software. Is it still possible to do a BFB tune and generate a BFB Tune evaluation report with the normal chemstation?

I tried doing the modified autotune mentioned in the note (Page 6 to 9) and I managed to obtained BFB1. U. The next step requires an injection of BFB and evaluating the tune file that I have created using EnviroQuant. Is there another procedure that I could use to replace EnviroQuant? Or is it necessary that I purchased the software?

[Lyne]

Sorry for the late reply!! I've been dealing with some instrumental problems recently. I've changed my enhanced data analysis from the GC configuration to environmental data analysis and evaluated my last attempt to do BFB tune using the modified autotune method that is found in the agilent application note. I noted that 174:95 failed by 1%. Hence, I tried using the BFB tune file found in the chemstation. I did an autotune, followed by BFB tune using the BFB.u file and ran a 50ng BFB solution. Everything passed!

Do I need to do autotune, followed by BFB tune? Or I could just do BFB tune before my instrument runs?

[Bigbear]

If you are using Agilent's canned BFB tune, that's all you need to run.
Lucky you that your instrument likes the bfb tune.