Seeking advice on SPE automation device

[foren]

Hi all,

Currently we have an online SPE system for clean up of honey (not very dirty, except sugars). We pack a small stainless steel column with the appropriate SPE packing. Autosamplers injections are diverted by a 6port valco valve to previously conditioned SPE packing and after washing steps, elution is diverted to column.
We have validated for repeated use with a very good reproducibility and we have multiple quality control samples in all sequences.

Now we are looking for an automated system working as described, but this time to elute samples to vials, since this online spe system is our bottleneck.

I have only found automated spe systems working with syringe type spe columns so far. Am I looking to wrong direction or a halucination?

Thanks,
Foren

[Mark Tracy]

Will moving the SPE automation to a separate device actually improve throughput? I assume the situation is that the HPLC run is considerably shorter than the SPE run. As long as the workflow is serial (SPE must complete before HPLC begins) you will not save time. Assume for example that the SPE takes 10 minutes and the HPLC 5 minutes, and a batch is 20 samples. Currently it takes 20*(10+5) = 300 minutes to run a batch. If you set it up so that the SPE system processes a batch, then you move it to the HPLC system, it takes 20*10 + 20*5 = 300 minutes.

The only way to improve throughput is to introduce some kind of parallelism either between the SPE and HPLC runs, or between sequential SPE runs. There are several ways to do this, but I'll describe only one possibility. Add a second pump to the current configuration. Then you can be cleaning and conditioning the SPE with one pump while running HPLC with the other. There are other variations on the general idea.