Milestone S.r.l. - START MOD - Microwave Open Vessel Digestion System

Acid digestion of organic samples produces gaseous by-products, such as CO2 and NOX. As a result, larger sample sizes produce higher pressures inside a closed digestion vessel. Furthermore, a larger sample size may lead to more exothermic and uncontrollable reactions. Generally, in a 100 ml pressure vessel, no more than 1 gram of dry organic sample can be digested.

The answer for larger sample size

Food, feed, electronic waste, polymers sand environmental samples typically require large mass to be digested: larger samples, on the order of several grams, are desirable in a variety of applications, to serve as a more representative portion of a larger sample bulk, or to compensate for limitations in the sensitivity of the analytical instrument. This is particularly true in applications such as plastics and polymers, waste products, food and feed, and a variety of other highly reactive compounds.

Milestone’s innovative START MOD system allows rapid digestion of 8 organic samples with dry weight up to several grams each. The unique advantage of the START MOD is that it can also be utilized as a closed-vessel digestion system, by adding any Milestone closed-vessel rotor, giving chemists the greatest flexibility within a single sample preparation platform. The built-in software allows the user to perform both open and closed-vessel procedures.
How the Start MOD works

The START MOD (Microwave Open Digestion) system consists of a microwave unit with an MOD-8 rotor, for processing up to eight samples simultaneously, a VAC- 4000 acid scrubber module, and a fully automated acid dosing system. The microwave unit is equipped with contact-less infrared temperature control in all vessels for consistent and reproducible results.
Operation is very simple: place the samples to be digested into the 250 ml glass or quartz vessels of the rotor. Then select the appropriate method for easy, medium, or difficult samples–or customize the time-at-temperature profile and dosing parameters to create your own program, which can be stored for repeated use. Press ‘Start’, and the system will automatically carry out the program, monitoring and controlling the temperature in each vessel, and continuously adjusting the microwave power output to match the desired temperature profile.
The fully automated dosing system will deliver precise amounts of as many as three different reagents at specified intervals. As the digestion proceeds, the VAC-4000 acid scrubber module safely and efficiently exhausts and neutralizes the acid vapours produced.