Chromatography Forum

Anyone have any experience with these H2 generators? I see a lot of them new on ebay at reasonable prices, but cannot find much information on them.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/High-purity-Hyd ... SwpDdU8Bhc

I've been using one for 2-3 years. They work fine, but they're cheaply made. No big surprise there.

Nothing's blown up... yet. Gives me a nice, smooth baseline on GC/FID, but I trap the hell out of it.

Hi osp001,

Im considering getting one of the H2 generator for use with a HP5890/FID. What's your current GC setup?

We used Parker-Balston hydrogen generator with 6890 GC, worked well. We used nitrogen as the make-up gas. If your 5890 GC is equipped with EPC, that would be better than manual pressure controls.

Agilent has a nice video of their technicians actually trying to explode a GC using hydrogen, was actually very difficult to do (they had to add extra hydrogen and use a spark), and the door retained the explosion. And the GC was still usable after that.

Hi osp001,

Im considering getting one of the H2 generator for use with a HP5890/FID. What's your current GC setup?

Same- Series II Plus 5890 with FID.

I recently had a containment failure of the gas drying tube on the gas generator; parts come from China, and everyone was on vacation for two weeks (!) so I kludged together a fix with epoxy. Conchoidal fracture of the acrylic (?) tube, which is very thick, overlapping with the threads, very nasty. Cyanoacrylate didn't fix it, polyurethane didn't fix it, only epoxy and lots of it.

Probably 4-5 years old at that point, I'd have to check, but the part was certainly not abused. Can't blame the maker- I wouldn't have expected fracture of that part in that location with such thick-wall acrylic.