Chromatography Forum

Hi , We got in our lab an methanizer. We use it to analyze CO in blood.

It works very good. Unfortunaly someone injected an wrong sample in our GC. Probably a solvent. The CO peak is reduced to only 1% compared to before.

I think the methanizer is saturated in some way.

Does anybody know if I should change the catalyst of the methanizer? And the kind of catalyst I should use?

greetings.

What GC arer you using.

Gasman

You can try to clean up the methanizer before purchasing a new one, or buying new catalyst.

The problem is likely that the catalyst is covered by hydrocarbons and inaccessible by the CO. If you blow air through the methanizer at a high temperature (~450C) the oxygen in the air will allow the hydrocarbons to burn off of the catalyst and make it accessible to the CO once again. You should probably do this for around 12 hours for a thorough cleaning.

Be sure to not get air into any of your columns!

We will try cleaning the catalyst with air.

I will post the results.


greetings.

We changed the catalyst and now it is working fine again.

Problem solved.


Tnx.