4 Tips for Preventing Breakdowns in Your Analytical Equipment

The analytical equipment used in laboratories, research centers, and manufacturing plants is expensive and often crucial to success. With such a high price tag, we often forget that this equipment can and will experience issues. Breakdowns in analytical equipment are a major liability, as they can cause laboratories to miss deadlines and lose customers. In some cases, the cost of the broken equipment may even exceed the loss from missed deadlines.

However, a robust preventive maintenance program will help reduce the risks of experiencing unwanted downtime. Here are 4 tips for minimizing breakdowns in your analytical equipment.

Proper Environmental Conditions

Analytical equipment like LC/MSs and GC/MSs generate a significant amount of heat, both from the instrument and attached peripherals (gas generators, vacuum pumps, et cetera). When temperatures become too hot, instruments will begin to malfunction.

It is important to always maintain an appropriate temperature and relative humidity in the laboratory, as the equipment must function normally to produce accurate results. This is best accomplished by preparing your site ahead of time with an appropriate HVAC system to accommodate your lab equipment.

In addition to preventing malfunctions, maintaining proper environmental conditions will also extend the life of the equipment.

Preventive Maintenance Plan

Every piece of analytical equipment will experience wear and tear over time. Preventative maintenance plans are the best way to reduce the risk of breakdowns in your equipment.

A robust Preventive Maintenance plan will consist of performing daily, weekly, and monthly checks and record keeping. For example, daily tasks for an LC/MS may include checking for LC leaks, ensuring adequate mobile phase volume (and not expired), and checking vacuum pump oil levels. Weekly and monthly tasks could include ion source maintenance, changing columns or guard columns, and CPU backups.

To create your own preventive maintenance plan, analyze what could cause the equipment to break down. Certain physical factors, like vibrations, changes in temperature or humidity, or even just usage can all lead to wear and tear on the equipment, resulting in downtime for your lab. Performing daily checks of potential trouble areas reduces the risk of in-run system failures.

By taking these steps and following a preventative maintenance plan for your analytical equipment, you will be able to minimize unforeseen downtime and keep your lab running smoothly.

The Agilent 6470b Ion Source

Equipment Performance Monitoring

Before your analytical equipment breaks down, the best preventive measure is to monitor against historical data. Monitoring equipment performance will help you identify potential problems before they occur.

There are several ways you can effectively monitor equipment performance. The first is by compiling daily performance records. Monitoring column pressures, sample counts, and vacuum pressures provide a good baseline monitor before running a single sample.

Preanalytical system suitability tests (SSTs) are also valuable. By comparing the same sample daily, you can monitor system performance through chromatographic peak areas (this can also be accomplished within run by tracking an internal standard). Observing an unexpected change in peak areas might be a signal for system maintenance. It is also advised to perform SST after any major system service, as replacing parts could cause a baseline change.

Spare Parts

As mentioned before, your analytical equipment is not bulletproof; the system will at some point go down and being prepared for a breakdown is crucial. One of the most important components in preventive maintenance is to ensure that you have spare parts. This will allow the lab to perform minor repairs thereby minimizing downtime for your analytical equipment when a problem does occur. This is especially important if your lab in not located near a major city.

While some parts are vendor specific, it is always important to keep spare consumables like columns, LC tubing and fitting, GC liners and ferrules, and other small, easily breakable parts on hand. Vendor specific consumables are advisable to have onsite when budget allows. Understanding the frequency that some of these parts fail (or need to be replaced) will allow your lab to be proactive in its maintenance plan.

Not having the necessary spare parts to correct a breakdown will cause a ripple effect within the lab, leading to more downtime. To avoid this, make sure you always have spare parts on-hand and ready to go.

Sciex 6500+ is a great LC/MS/MS system. This is the last thing you hope to see on a service visit; with proper preventive maintenance, rail pulls or other extensive maintenance can be minimized.

A Manufacturer Service Contract

The latest analytical equipment is expensive, with some LC/MS systems selling for well over $250,000. Large replacement parts (such as turbo pumps or electronics boards) for these instruments are also expensive to replace, potentially ranging into the tens of thousands of dollars. When these parts break, calling in a service engineer is your only option.

Manufacturer service contracts are typically purchased with new instrumentation, or you may even receive one for your first year of ownership as part of the purchase price. These contracts are usually 1-5 years in length and will include the onsite assessment and repair of instrumentation. A contract provides peace of mind that if your equipment breaks down, it will be repaired by the manufacturer in a timely manner.

While service contracts can be pricy, they can also be a life saver for your lab. If under contract, equipment failures are covered. Most contracts stipulate a time requirement for an engineer to be onsite to assess the problem. Once the fault is determined, engineers order parts and can have you back up in hours or days. Without a contract, laboratories will pay for service engineer’s time and materials, plus will be lowest priority for repair triage. With turbo pumps costing well over $10,000 for some instruments, repairs like this can cost upwards of $15,000-$20,000.

Manufacturer Service Contracts are an investment that will not only keep your analytical equipment running smoothly but will also save your lab time and money.

Maximizing Run Time

Preventive maintenance cannot be accomplished in a single step – it is required daily to maintain a healthy running lab. Utilizing each of these tips will allow your lab to not only minimize downtime but to also have the peace of mind that you are covered when problems do occur.

If you are looking for the best preventive maintenance solutions for maximum lab efficiency or have any other questions, contact us.