CHROMATOGRAPHY
AUTONOMOUS SCIENCE
Y
ou are driving along a busy road, yet you are calm and are listening to your favourite music. But what defines driving these days? Te key
never left your pocket, yet the car opened when you approached it, the engine started at the push of a button, the headlights came on automatically, the climate control created a comfortable environment and the wipers started automatically and took care of that light drizzle halfway down the road. Te car reminds you now and then of the upcoming service in half a year, gentle vibrations in the steering remind you to use the indicators when changing lanes and emergency brake assistants can jump in at the last second to protect you and the people outside from harm. How did we get here? In the years after 1885, following the invention of the car, the driver needed to understand the difference between diesel and petrol engines, needed to monitor temperatures and liquid levels of coolants and oils, gauge the lifetime of driving belts based on the odometer and match the engine speeds when changing gears. Leaps in sensor technology, safety and automation have made driving second nature to us, limiting the technical interaction with our cars to
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www.scientistlive.com
Dr Moritz Kneipp reveals how developments in the automotive industry can predict the future of chromatography applications
scheduling a service. Te car checks itself and the owners can trust the car to do the job they expect of it: getting you there, in some cases even autonomously.
REPEATING HISTORY A similar trend is revolutionising chromatography applications. Smarter systems, machine learning and ever- increasing amounts of data are creating new possibilities to automate, reduce unplanned downtime and predict maintenance schedules, thus widening the customer base to include a wider spectrum of professionals, not just specifically trained scientists. As with cars, these developments are in part fuelled by leaps in sensor technology that, for example, allow online liquid
flow rate measurements down to single nanolitres per minute.
ARTISAN SCIENCE Early iterations of chromatography systems required their operators – typically a highly trained scientist in a high-tech research facility – to manually prepare each sample for the next experiment. Although an analytical procedure or process can be as short as minutes or even seconds, typical sample preparation steps take hours to complete. Tis sample preparation depends on the specific compounds of interest and may include weighing, filtering, evaporation, liquid-liquid extraction and homogenisation. But the manual work was not yet done. Each of the painstakingly prepared samples
Sensirion liquid flow sensors
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