Büchi Labortechnik AG - SPE and Evaporation

Conventional solid phase extraction (SPE), an essential step in many analytical procedures, includes a number of laborious steps such as conditioning, enrichment, washing and elution. This is conventionally achieved by means of a simple vacuum manifold equipped with 12 or 24 ports for the SPE cartridges. The big advantage of this setup is undisputable its low initial costs. The downside, however, are the many time consuming manual sample handling steps involved, resulting in high running costs. Moreover, a transfer of the eluates to a parallel evaporator (or rotary evaporator) is inevitable in order to concentrate the samples subsequent to the SPE work-up step.

A newly modified Syncore Analyst or Polyvap overcomes these shortcomings while fulfilling the following requirements:

• The operational steps for the SPE process, i.e. conditioning, enrichment, washing and elution, shall be carried out without interruption to reduce sample handling and the amount of glassware used.
• Concentration of the eluates to pre-defined residual volumes is achieved on the same instrument without any interruption or exchange of equipment to make sample transfer obsolete and to reduce the amount of valuable bench top space and equipment costs.
• The flow of each port must be individually adjustable to handle samples with considerable differences in sorbent consistencies and/or matrix constituents.
• Avoidance of cross-contamination for both SPE work-up and parallel evaporation is crucial to guarantee no interferences of adjacent samples.
• High recoveries for both steps are crucial, particularly for volatile compounds.