GCMS Maintenance: Keeping Your GCMS Running

The objective of the research, production and activities performed in your laboratory is to collect data. Your ability to achieve this is only as strong as your equipment’s dependability and accuracy. This makes preventative and periodic maintenance extremely important. This is especially true for more complex systems like your gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GCMS) assets. GCMS is an ideal method to separate, identify, and quantify analytes of complex mixtures. When properly maintained, these instruments provide the accurate analysis required by your laboratory. 

The following topics cover the routine tasks that as part of a preventative maintenance approach, will ensure that your GCMS will provide the results that you need. The majority of GCMS issues can be prevented by addressing the components in these topics with a well-organized maintenance plan.

GCMS Detector Preventative Maintenance Considerations:

• Daily MSD PFTBA tuning and evaluation  – Your daily PFTBA tune is an invaluable tool to ensure optimum and reliable performance of your GCMS system. There’s more information and symptoms that a proper tuning can detect than you might realize.

• Source Cleaning – It’s not as daunting or time consuming as you might think and that prior autotune can tell you hardware status and parts issues before even venting the system. Work smarter (not harder).

• Vacuum integrity and pumps – Whether you have a turbo pump or diffusion pump, there are different strategies in maintaining them as well as your rough pumps. (Let’s not forget the vacuum hoses and o-rings as well).

• Inlet and column maintenance. A lot of gremlins can hide in that GCMS inlet and column. How to keep the inlets clean and knowing when to change the column is essential to your analysis. 

• Autosamplers: ALS, HS, P&T – Liquid autosamplers, Headspace Samplers , and Purge & Traps need love and attention. It’s an awful feeling when you come in Monday morning and find the autosampler stuck on your fourth sample of a one hundred sample sequence! Minimize the risk – Mondays are tough enough.

• Control charts – A pain, but an awesome tool to ensure consistent performance, minimize downtime and keep your train on the rails! Your QAQC department will love you.

• Procedural and Instrument Blanks, and SIM blindness – What are those surprise or unknown peaks in your normal sample batch? A review of procedural and instrument blanks, where’d they come from? The folks in the prep lab or is your instrument dirtier than you realized? Do you mainly run in selected ion monitoring mode (SIM)? If so, you might get blindsided by non-target contamination or influences. Have you tried running monthly Full Scan (FS) instrument blanks?

• Computer maintenance and backing up data – Take the bull by the horns (or at least your IT department by the hand) and make the case for a clean drive, lots of RAM and free memory to run smoothly. Do your disk maintenance, defragging, and more on the weekends automatically. Back up your data, acquisition methods, and quantitation data on a regularly scheduled basis and no, Alexa cannot run samples, yet – but we’ll get you close.

• Gas Supply and Filtration – Clean gases with proper filters and when to change them. Do I stay with Helium as a carrier gas or should I consider changing to Hydrogen? O2, Water, or excess Nitrogen in my autotune - where is it coming from? Is it time for a gas generator?

• Tough analyses with complex matrices and finicky compounds that like to degrade - Pesticides, Phthalates, Saturated Alkanes and Fuel analysis, Biomarkers, Crude oil unresolved complex mixtures (UCMs), plant or animal tissues, Cannabinoids and Terpenes, Residual Solvents. All have their unique challenges to methodology, clean up techniques, and detector optimization.

Whether your GCMS systems are new or reconditioned, Overbrook can help.