History of Metrohm IC – Part 2
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In the second part of our series behind the development of high quality ion chromatography instrumentation at Metrohm, I will cover the mid 1990s until the mid 2000s. During this time, Metrohm focused on modular IC, lowering background suppression, as well as bringing further robust detection methods on to the market.
?The 1990‘s. People start to care about the environment. Authorities impose quantitative limits on the presence of many substances, most of which must be detected down to trace levels. Metrohm builds the perfect tool for this: the 761 Compact IC.?
Dr. Helwig Sch?fer, retired Head of R&D ion chromatography, Metrohm AG
2nd generation: The modular IC system – 1996
While the Labograph was soon replaced by integrators (initially with integrators and later on by PC-based integration tools), the conductivity detector stood unbeaten for a long period. Improvements to the system setup, as well as additional liquid handling tools and automation capabilities yielded the second generation of Metrohm IC: the modular system.
At the same time, the initial patents on chemical suppression were about to expire, allowing the possibility to begin the development of the Metrohm Suppressor Module.
Metrohm Suppressor Module (MSM)
The idea for the MSM is based on the suppression column as described in the paper by Small, Stevens, and Baumann. Its main purpose is to remove the eluent conductivity after the separation and prior to the conductivity detection. Thus, the eluent needs to be convertible to water by ion exchange.
In the case of anion chromatography, sodium hydroxide is an example of such a candidate. By replacing sodium by a proton through ion exchange, the eluent is converted to water alone. The authors applied a suppressor column of opposite charge (compared to the analytical column) after the analytical column.
As with all things, suppressor columns do have a couple of disadvantages. They have to be externally regenerated on occasion. Depending on the amount of cations already bound to the suppressor column, its separation and ion-exclusion behavior is modified. This leads to changes in retention times of the ions, especially regarding the carbonate peak, which shifts quite strongly and interferes with other peaks of interest. On the other hand, one of the most positive points of suppressor columns is their ruggedness.
Metrohm was looking for solutions to the disadvantages without compromising the ruggedness of this column-based approach.
To overcome the shifting retention time over the usage of suppressor columns, the dimensions of the column were reduced dramatically. This yielded in a small cartridge-like compartment. The exchanger capacity needed to stay high enough for running, minimally, one single chromatogram. Under the precondition that only one chromatogram is suppressed with a single suppressor compartment, in this way all determinations have exactly the same conditions and no retention time shifts can occur.
Now it was required to regenerate the suppressor compartment prior to the next sample injection. Here, the idea of a rotating unit with three compartments was born.
All three compartments are connected to a liquid stream: i.e. unit 1 suppresses the eluent conductivity in the analytical stream, unit 2 is being regenerated with acid, and unit 3 is rinsed (acid-free) with ultrapure water or with the detector effluent (now known as STREAM). Prior to each injection, the MSM rotor is switched by one position. In this way, each injection uses its own freshly regenerated and rinsed suppressor unit.