Q: Are rising helium prices and long analysis times slowing down your GC-MS lab’s throughput?

Ask any lab manager and they’ll say the budget is one of their constant headaches. Everything costs money, and the rising cost and decreasing supply of helium means sacrifices have to be made elsewhere to keep everything in balance. Running more GC-MS samples could help offset the costs, but that in itself would take more helium or more instruments. Sacrificing the quality of results is not an option, and neither is retraining the laboratory staff with anything new.

A:Using hydrogen as a carrier gas is surprisingly simple and effective, with the right setup.

Hydrogen is a cheap and renewable resource that can be used in LECO’s Pegasus® BT with minimal change-over time and huge benefits in speed. The Pegasus BT’s open ion source design eliminates concerns of spectral quality degradation observed on other GC-MS systems when switching over to hydrogen, and online method converters can translate your existing methods to the narrower columns used for hydrogen without any loss of chromatographic resolution. When you combine the cost-savings of hydrogen with a potential speed increase factor of over 3.5, why wouldn’t you make the switch? More samples run in less time with lower costs per analysis is always a winning equation.

Learn more about Fast GC at: https://knowledge.leco.com/fast-gc