Chromatography Forum

Hello,
I have a problem with an HP1100 regular autosampler (G1313A). In the past I had a couple of errors pop-up that said motor 2 overheat (theta gripper motor I assume). This occured mostly in runtimes under 5 minutes and my runs would stop... I didn't have a problem with it since I now used 10min runs between injections however about a year later and now I got this problem once last week and this week the injector will not reinitialize when the power is turned back on. It stops in the middle of initialization and says in chemstation: initialization failed (3028) or (3022).
Now it makes a sound like something is forcing but I cannot figure out where it comes from. An electrical technician did take resistance of motor 2 and 3 and both gave 40ohm so coils seem to be ok... each motor also gives small pulses at the beginning of the initialization and if I move the unit by hand it will sometimes move always to the farther top left corner and stay there... everything seems to be clean in there so I was wondering if it could be the encoder in motor 2 that is the problem or could it be the transport assembly or mainboard that short circuited??
Can also someone tell me in the early steps of initialization of the ALS if the 3 grippers that grip vials move in the first seconds? because I do not see that happening, thats from motor 3....
Hopefully I can get some help from this forum.
Thanks!
fbreton

Electrical faults usually cause total failure, not this kind of progressive failure. This sounds like a mechanical problem. Something has excess friction and overloads the motor. This could be made worse by a blocked air passage or bad fan contributing to heat buildup. You can try partially disassembling the drive and arm, then cleaning and lubricating the works.

I don't believe that meassuring R though a motor is a valid way of checking it... there are brushings, bearings and a lot of other things that can be screwed in a motor... it's rarely the coil thats ruined (in my experience).

Already when you started to receive overheating problems on a motor that only ran every 5 min you should have worried.. That tells me something is seriosly wrong! And it's probably a worsening of this problem you are seeing now. You could try disasemble and clean but that is usually a temporerry solution if the motor is on the blink.. and you'd have to get into the motor and lubericat inside where the coil turns around.

I'm afraid your probably looking at a motor exchange.

edit: I just checked our 1100 autosampler and there is no movement of the gripper arms when initialiasing.

does anyone have any idea what initialization failed (3028) or initialization failed (3022) refers to? because it could also be the flex board that is damaged. if this is the case maybe this message is the answer?
Thanks!

3020 means : "could not move X-axis "
3022 means : "could not move Theta"
3028 means " G(ripper) Sensor defective"
If you have such error messages there is only one thing you can do:
Open the ALS Door and take a look inside. You will see a (more or less) shiny metal rod where the als arm is moving from left to right. This rod gets dirty during time. So you can clean this rod (NOT the snail-wheel which causes the arm to move) with isopropanol. This dirt causes friction and so the motor gets overheated. Do not lubricate the rod, this will make it worse !!
In your case its possible that only the gripper is defective which means you just have to change the gripper arm !! The partnumber is G1313-60010 , see the reference manual how to exchange the gripper arm !
If this does not help you should call agilent.