Chromatography Forum

We are getting a refurbished 6890 at our lab here to run concentrations and screen for our GC/IRMS, and I was wondering, is there an easier way to make Agilent's purged packed column compatible with both capillary and packed columns besides swapping the liners? From the manual it looks as if you can only use one or the other at a time depending on the liner you install, but is there some sort of cheaper adapter unit that will eliminate the need to switch liners? Thank you!

Since you will be cooling the inlet to change columns, why not just change liners at the same time ?. Liner changes are a frequent maintenance action, so you need to be able to do them quickly and easily anyway.

Peter

The purged packed inlet on the Agilent GC's will take packed columns or "Capillary" columns. You do this by changing the liners which basically either have a standard Swagelok fitting for packed columns or a special fitting for 'Capillary' columns. You can only really use 530 columns and you can not run the inlet in split mode or the splitless mode that you have on the standard capillary inlet.

Gasman

I think you would be better served to get a split/splitless inlet as it will give you more flexibility as to what columns you can use.

I'm trying to convince my colleagues to get a split/splitless, as that's what I originally thought we'd be using anyway, but until I can get them to get one, I guess I'll take Peter's advice, makes sense to me, thank you for the input!