Chromatography Forum

Hello,
I inherited a project involving Thermal Desorption to GC/MS. I'm trying to start up the system and i get a Temperature fault error. Everything except the trap gets to temp. I'm not entirely sure what the Temperature is supposed to be as the program seems to only have a low (-30) high (320) and Rate (40 C/s) it cycles for about an hour before faulting out. The manual only says "call your Perkin-Elmer Service Technician" does anyone have thoughts on what may be causing this and how to rectify it?

I have never worked with a turbomatrix but have dealt with similar problems on other instruments. It has usually been one of four problems.

The heater is out.
The thermocouple is out.
The setpoints/rates have been changed to something crazy.
The insulation/ventilation is compromised.

It is usually one of the first two. If the trap is heating up but the temperature is not rising or the temperature is nonsense look into the thermocouple.

If the heater is no heating it may need to be repaired or replaced.

good luck,
Damien

Everything except the trap gets to temp

So if you set it to 10°C does it get close to 10°C
and if you set it to -10°C does it get close to -10°C
but the temperature readings jumps about ?

As I had a TurboMatrix 150 that just wouldn't settle down,
and traced it to the Heater Element around the trap losing its
integrity, as Dreggio mentioned as his forth point.

To check this, what I had done was run a super fine copper wire
that did not have any coating, and twirled it around the heater
element and earthed it to the chassis.

The reason why the temperature values were constantly jumping was
because the heater coil was constantly being pulsed, and as the insulation
around the heater coil broke down, the leaking electrons would earth out
via the temperature sensor, which would register as a change in temperature.

Is the trap temperature sensor contacting the heating element?
Is there a bunch of condensation frozen on the trap cooling Peltier?
The 650 should have the clear cover over the trap oven. You should be able to inspect this.
There's only a couple heated zones on the turbomatices.

Tube
Valve
transfer line
trap, heater and Peltier
The 650 may have an additional heater zone for the split recapture feature. I never saw a need for that.

adjust the temp settings, see how long it takes to get and keep a stable temp. The trap will not heat until a run is started or if you use trap test or trap clean modes. check your manual for what each of those modes do.

Thanks for the input everyone! It turned out to be the power-supply to the Petlier Cooler. Which seems a bit unusual but hey it works now.