The University of Manchester Earth Sciences Department has recently purchased a Metrohm 790 Personal Ion Chromatograph, and so far appears delighted with the results
Alastair Bewsher is an experienced user of ion chromaography equipment and after seeing the performance of the Personal IC last year decided that he just had to have one - and at a cost of just over £6000 they could afford to do just that.
The instrument has been used routinely for the analysis of anions in water but has also been used by many of the students in the department who find the instrument exceptionally easy to use.
One of the latest experiments was that of a mineral dissolution in 0.1N HCl.
There were literally only a few grains of sample so only a very small volume of acid could be used.
The main analyte of interest was phosphate.
Only 100µl of the acid was used to react with the mineral and the final solution was diluted 1:6 to provide enough sample to inject.
Alastair injected his only sample and got a perfect chromatogram.
The high concentration of chloride did not have any effect on the retention time or peak shape of the phosphate so quantitation was easy.
The column used was a Cetac ICSep AN1.
Most of the work carried out on the Metrohm at present is to do with the MSc projects.
The students are trained on the IC and then they are left to do the analysis.
Samples include river waters, acid mine drainage samples, synthetic groundwaters, estuarine samples and leachates of various descriptions.
Eluant prep is straightforward and so far, we have not had any problems with the system.
Alastair works in the Analytical Geochemistry Laboratory which is part of the Williamson Research Centre for Molecular Environmental Science within the Earth Sciences Department, specialising in inorganic analysis of environment samples, mainly in support of post graduate studies.
