On 9/8/00, Gordon Alton of Signal Pharmaceuticals wrote about an accident
that happened during the installation of a microbore HPLC system when using
fused silica tubing shrouded with PEEK for a high pressure line.
As a vendor who has sold microbore, capillary and nanoscale HPLC systems
for the past 12 years, I can say that we have never experienced a problem
like this because we would never use PEEK shrouded fused silica for a high
pressure line. We have 1/16" OD PEEK tubing with IDs down to 75 micron,
which works well for flow rates down to 20 ul/min (microbore flows usually
20-200 ul/min) and we use 50 and 25 micron ID by 1/16" OD PEEKSIL tubing
(fused silica tubing that's coated with aluminum and then coated with PEEK
to make one solid tube) for capillary (flows from 2 - 20 ul/min) and
nanoscale (flows from 0.1 - 1 ul/min) HPLC and LC/MS applications.
Using these tubes in a well configured, low volume HPLC system allows the
user to work with simple, standard 1/16" 10-32 fittings while still keeping
gradient delay times of 1-3 minutes (even at flows as low as 100 nl/min).
I agree with Gordon that safety is of paramount concern when working with
any high pressure LC system, and users should be cautious when working with
vendors who are new to nano/capillary/microbore HPLC or when trying to
convert analytical HPLC systems to these lower flow applications.
Kerry D. Nugent
President
Michrom BioResources, Inc.
1945 Industrial Drive
Auburn, CA 95603
Phone: (530) 888-6498
FAX: (530) 888-8295
Email: michromintl@psyber.com
WWW: http://www.michrom.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Sep 20 2000 - 11:12:13 EDT