Reuse The Chromatographic Sample Vial After Cleaning

At present, with the increasing interest in food quality and safety from all walks of life, chromatographic analysis technology is increasingly used in food quality and safety testing, especially been widely used in the field of agricultural product testing, chromatographic analysis technology.

In China, a large number of agricultural products (other chemical products, organic acids, etc.) need to be tested by liquid chromatography and gas chromatography every year. Due to a large number of samples, there are a large number of sample vials that need to be cleaned during the detection process, which not only wastes time and reduces work efficiency, but also sometimes causes deviations in experimental results due to the cleanliness of the cleaned sample vials.

The chromatographic sample vial is mainly made of glass and seldom made of plastic. Disposable sample vials are costly, wasteful, and cause serious environmental pollution. Most laboratories clean the sample vials and reuse them.

At present, the methods commonly used in laboratories to clean the sample vial are mainly adding washing powder, detergent, organic solvent, and acid-base lotion, and then scrubbing with a customized small test tube.

This conventional scrubbing method has many shortcomings. It uses large amounts of detergent and water, takes a long time for washing, and tends to leave dead corners. If it is a plastic sample vial, it is easy to leave brush marks on the inner vial wall, which takes up a lot of human resources. For glassware that is heavily contaminated by lipid and protein residues, alkaline lysis solution is used for cleaning, and good results are achieved.

If you want to reuse it, the suggestions are as follows:
(1) Trivial cleaning, steadfast results:
a. After the sample vial is used, rinse the sample vial with running water first, and rinse the remaining sample (you can shake it by hand at the same time);
b. Then put the sample vial into the potassium dichromate lotion bubble, when it accumulates to a certain amount or one day when you are in a good mood, take it out of the lotion tank, put it in a kitchen plastic sieve, and rinse it with tap water. It can be shaken repeatedly in the middle;
c. After washing, use tap water to ultrasonically clean about 3 times. It is best to shake out the water in the sample vial after each ultrasonic cleaning;
d. Use three distilled water (or purified water, deionized water) with 1.3 ultrasonic cleanings three times;
e. Use chromatographic pure methanol to ultrasonically clean 2-3 times. It is also best to shake the methanol out of the sample vial after each cleaning;
f. Put the sample vial in the oven and dry it at about 80 degrees, and it can be used.

(2) Purchase sample vials marked with different colors:
I don’t know if you have paid attention, there is a small colored mark on the sample vial, which is not for good-looking, but has its use.

At last:
1. Our instrument engineers have suggested: bake in a muffle furnace at 400 degrees for about half an hour, the organic things are basically gone;
2. Put the sample vial into the muffle furnace and dry at 300 degrees Celsius.

When buying, it is best to buy several sample vials of different colors at the same time. For example, your laboratory needs to conduct two projects A and B at the same time. The first time, A project uses a white sample vial, and the B project uses a blue sample vial. After the test is completed, it is cleaned according to the above method, and the second experiment if using blue sample vials for A project, so the white sample vials for B project, and so on, you can clearly distinguish two colors corresponding to different items, it also can effectively avoid the trouble caused by pollution to your work.