Diary of a Mad Scientist

Well obviously it’s been forever since I’ve posted anything to the blog. I had quite a saga with torn ligaments in my right hand, something that started back in September, and has been bothering me ever since. Spent some time a cast, and spent some time trying not to use the computer at all, which is incredibly difficult for me. Spent quite a bit of time freaking out thinking that I was going to have to get surgery. Eek.

Today I made somewhat of a stride forward in the GC saga.

We picked up the machines in December, we being me and Concrete Community College (and also Piedmont biofuels, to whom I shipped one). The school and I got one each. There are also several parts machines, which we’ve been vigorously stripping and trading off for the parts we actually need. gas chromatographs are set up for different kinds of tests, with differing kinds of equipment. My impression is that the setup that we use for biodiesel is fairly rare in the world of GC testing. So here’s what has happened so far:

we picked up the gas chromatographs with mostly wrong detectors and completely wrong injectors for $1000 each. (We knew exactly what we are getting, and the chances of finding one of these with the correct injector for biodiesel are quite slim) The base units that we’ve purchased are 1980s HP 5980’s. There were actually two FID detectors on one of the machines, so me and the college each got one. The chemist at the college who’s spearheading this project has managed to trade away the ECD detectors that came with their unit (nice, radioactive, expensive), so we managed to get rid of something that we didn’t need and couldn’t afford to run, and in trade, picked up two cool-on-column injectors- those are worth about $1500 each, and you need them for the biodiesel analysis. THey’ve got a little heater that looks like a micro-VegTherm attached for the temperature changes that are needed in the analysis.

Then the saga with the school started. They’re quite poorly funded. They have the usual multilayered financial bureaucracy of a public institution. They agreed to pay for some of the equipment needed to set up their own machine (I’m paying for mine, with some help from donations). Then they took many, many, many months to put in the order for parts that they agreed to pay for. It’s taken several months to get a 20 amp outlet put in, and, in the end, they only gave us one and we needed two, so now we have to wait for a second to appear, sometime… Months ago, they green-lighted ordering the regulators for the ultrapure gases for the machine, and something got very screwy with that also so they’re not here yet either. At any rate, I’m buying my own regulators so that we can charge ahead.

Today, however, we cleaned the machines fully and actually started installing stuff, now that we have electricity to run at least one machine with. I started taking pictures, although all of these parts are also very well documented at the Agilent web site (don’t ask me questions about these machines, I really dont know enough to answer them). We’ve managed to acquire a fantastic haul of stuff in this process- I was originally slightly concerned about it, as the school was buying its machines sight unseen and the lab I purchased from unloaded five machines on me (three working, two not)- but when I showed up at the school with a vanload of dusty machines, oily power cords, ancient computers, and random parts, it was obvious that the organic chemistry instructors appreciate ’salvage’ just as much as I do. Out of this deal, the school’s machine will have two different detectors and injectors to play with, and the machines are replacing some even older gas chromatographs they had, which were not really adequate for the experiments they wanted to do in the chem classes.

Apparently one of the things they’ll be doing in Organic Chem class is fatty acid analysis using GC, something that’s quite interesting to me for various biodiesel experiments.