The Shared Instrument Lab is open again following last night’s planned power outage. Most instruments are available now (the GCMS and benchtop NMR being notable exceptions); remember to check the calendar for availability. There is some question as to whether or not the planned power outage actually occurred – and if not, when it might…
SIL to close for planned power outage
The Shared Instrument Lab will close at 4pm on Monday, December 22nd, in advance of a power outage planned for the morning of Tuesday, December 23rd. The power outage is projected to last two hours, so most instruments ought to be available by mid-day; the GCMS will need a few hours to pump down, and…
SIL back in service following planned power outage
The Shared Instrument Lab is mostly back in service following this morning’s planned power outage. The GCMS is pumping down and will be unavailable until this evening, and the Spinsolve benchtop NMR will be stabilizing until tomorrow morning; remember to check the calendar for availability of these and all other instruments. All users should note…
FTIR returned to service
The Thermo iS50 FTIR has been returned to service after hands-on intervention by a Thermo field service engineer. With fixes made and tests successfully passed, the instrument is once again ready for your samples! I will be listening for the sounds of celebration….
Update on FTIR
To those who emailed asking for more details on the FTIR, including a projected time frame for its return to service, this post is the response. BREAKING NEWS (8/22/2025 2:51pm CDT) A replacement laser is on order and should arrive next week. If the replacement laser can be shipped early next week, I hope to…
FTIR out of service
In the wake of yesterday morning’s power outage, the HeNe laser in the FTIR has died – thus rendering the instrument inoperable. A replacement laser will be purchased and installed, but it will be at least a week before the instrument is in service again. Stay tuned….
Room 140 closed temporarily
Unrestrained water, ever the bane of instrumental analysts, has put in yet another appearance in Schrenk Hall. This week’s episode* involves a leak in a deionized water line under a sink on the 3rd floor, an overnight leak which turned into a full-blown mess spanning four floors. As a consequence of the damage and ongoing…
FTIR returned to service
After a bunch of back and forth with tech support, and arriving at the point where they recommended a service call (read: $$$$) I decided to give the instrument one more round of diagnostics. I fiddled with a bunch of settings that should have no effect (and didn’t, which I suppose is reassuring). I was…
FTIR out of service
The FTIR has been a little hit-and-miss lately with operation, and the intermittent nature of the problem has prevented Thermo from offering any concrete solutions. Today we have a solid symptom: the interferometer is not moving under software control; thus, no data can be acquired, and the instrument cannot even align its own optics. Consequently,…
New bulk storage on GCMS
The QP-2020 GCMS was equipped with two hard drives in a RAID1 configuration (i.e., mirrored) at the time it was installed. One of those two drives failed, which was not the end of the world…but had the other one also failed, it would have been quite problematic. This morning a new solid state drive was…