Thames Water has chosen the Thermo Scientific Icap 6000 Series ICP emission spectrometer for the detection and quantification of trace elements in drinking water samples.
Thames Water carries out more than half a million water quality tests each year to ensure the quality of its drinking water and environmental compliance of treated wastewater.
With such a high analytical throughput, the company requires highly reliable analytical instrumentation for its routine analyses.
The Icap 6000 Series helps Thames Water accurately measure the trace element content of potable water, ensuring the water supplied to its customers complies with strict regulations governing the UK water industry.
Thames Water offers extended analytical capabilities in microbiology, organic and inorganic chemistry, materials testing and metals analysis.
The company is independently regulated by the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI), which monitors and enforces regulations on behalf of the secretary of state for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).
The DWI imposes stringent standards on laboratories, with more than 50 different parameters used to assess the quality of drinking water.
Thames Water bought three Icap 6000 Series instruments to support its move to centralised laboratory testing.
An advantage of the Icap 6000 Series in a high throughput laboratory is its excellent stability and resistance to drift.
This results in a higher frequency of quality-control checks falling within DWI limits, resulting in fewer retests.
The high specification optical design of the Icap 6000 provides excellent resolution and sensitivity, delivering up to a five-fold improvement in detection capability.
The Icap 6000 is supported by Iteva software, which allows full multi-tasking flexibility, enabling the editing of the active sample lists while automated analytical operations are occurring.
In a high throughput laboratory where efficient analysis is crucial, Iteva guarantees data integrity while maintaining fast storage and access facilities.
