News — column repair union
Cutting Fused Silica Capillary Columns per LC-GC Application Note
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Polymicro Technologies (a division of Molex) was the first company to mass produce fused silica capillary for the entire capillary gas chromatography market. That was thirty years ago and they are still the single largest manufacturer of the materials. (Polyimide coated, fused silica capillary for GC columns was an HP invention, but they reserved their production for themselves, alone.) Polymicro has made more GC capillary than anyone on the planet, by far: they are considered the experts and they are exceptionally good at what they do, of that there is no doubt. I started my career at Polymicro in the late 1980: I...
Instructions: IQ’s Sapphire™ Wafers for Cutting GC Capillary Columns
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Cutting capillary and making gas-tight seals is critical to good GC practice and making seals on silica press-fit connectors requires almost perfect cuts (unless you are using Pres2fit™ connectors). Cleanly cut ends are also important for CE for minimizing distortions of the electric field at the column ends. Capillary: The first thing that the separation scientist needs to understand is that not all silica capillary is the same. There are three major producers of GC and CE capillary around the world in Australia, Germany and in the USA. While very similar in materials of production, the differences in production methods...
Repairing a Column with a Press2Fit™ Union
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Purpose: Provide step-by-step instructions for best practices in capillary column repair Theory: GC capillary columns sometimes break on the column cage. While most of the causes of such failures are relatively benign, some may portent coming disaster (see #6 in “How to Properly Cut Capillary Columns”) and improper repair of a capillary column break can convert a benign failure into a catastrophic failure. Benign sources of failure are inadvertent, local damage in handling, polyimide erosion or abrasion due to contact with the wire cage and the occasional, random flaw manifesting itself. Such breaks are, by definition, “improper column...
Why do GC Capillary Connections Leak?
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The 3 Leading Causes of Column Leaks Among some chromatographers, capillary connections using press fit connectors have a reputation for leaking. Where there was a time when this was true, that time has past. InnovaQuartz collected and studied leaks from the field for a period of three years; 28 of the leaks were in our own products (of over 1,000,000 sold in that same period) and most of those were Y-splitters. We found that 98+% of leaks in press fit connections arise from three classes of problems, all of which may be addressed by a correctly designed connector: 1) Less...