“You Are What You Eat.” Your Customer’s Instrument is what you Feed It!

We have all heard this expression and, I guess to a degree, it is true. If you continually put good things into your body, you’ll probably be pretty healthy. If you put bad things in your body, bad things usually happen.

Well, it’s the same in the analytical world with sensitive equipment like gas chromatographs (GC), mass spectrometers (MS), and so on. So, to stay with the metaphor, what do they eat? Thank goodness for all of us in the specialty gas sales business sensitive equipment has a voracious appetite for gases ... good, clean, pure, uncontaminated gas. Helium, nitrogen, zero air ... it’s all prime rib to these laboratory animals.

Now let’s go back to my opening statement. “We are what we eat,” Right? So, have you ever ordered a prime rib with a side of mashed potatoes and had your order delivered to your table with mashed potatoes that were laced with a heavy dose of garlic, which was undetectable to the naked eye? If you get heartburn from garlic, the mistake will not go undetected to your system. If we do detect garlic’s presence from its aroma, we have the option to send the meal back, with a stern complaint to the chef.

A piece of analytical equipment is not so lucky. It has no option but to consume what the operators feed it. In the world of analytical equipment, the garlic is moisture, hydrocarbons, and other various elements of contamination. Feed a GC a good dose of moisture via a contaminated cylinder of helium and the results will be catastrophic ... failed test results, repeat testing, down time, extra expense in parts, etc. Here is your side of garlic potatoes giving the lab technician a good case of heartburn.

Try delivering contaminated gases into a $300,000 mass spectrometer and see who gets the heartburn! I can assure you that the heartburn will flow downhill if the source of the contamination was the gas. The gas supplier who delivered the contaminated gas will surely share the burn.

Analytical equipment has a very sensitive “stomach” and will not perform well at all if we feed it fouled gases. Sometimes it is appealing to purchase gases from a supplier because the prices are cheap. I can assure you that cheap gases come at a price.

True ultra-high-purity gases are the filet mignon at the analytical table. Don’t sell your equipment short by buying questionable gases at a cut rate. You have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars on the equipment in your labs. Why would you feed the equipment an inferior gas product to save a few dollars? It will cost you more in the long run.

Gases should be purchased from a supplier who has also invested in some of the same equipment that is found in the pharmaceutical or research lab. A supplier who knows what the value of that investment is to the end-user will certainly follow procedures that will ensure the integrity of the gas delivered. An ultra-high-purity gas that is produced and packaged properly will work flawlessly with analytical equipment, the way it was intended to. No garlic potatoes, no heartburn. The burden of the quality of the gas falls on the gas supplier. It is up to the customer to choose the supplier with the appropriate product, not the lowest price. Quality comes at a price.

Buy smart. Bon Appetit!!

Mike Lee is Specialty Gas Manager for Middlesex Gases & Technologies, Everett, Mass. He can be reached at Mlee@middlesexgases.com

Specialty Gas Report THIRD QUARTER 2007 //