(330b) Accelerating Sample Preparation in the Biofuel R&D by Automated High Output Technologies
AIChE Annual Meeting
2008
2008 Annual Meeting
Fuels and Petrochemicals Division
Alternative Fuels and Enabling Technologies III
Tuesday, November 18, 2008 - 3:35pm to 3:55pm
The general need for increased efficiency in the laboratory has kick-started the development of innovative equipment for workflow automation.
Many laboratories within the chemical industry in the meantime have adopted the use of automated High-Output-Technologies, which has been boosting productivity in the pharmaceutical industry since several decades.
New research fields like ?Biofuels & Renewable Energy Sources? recently started to automate their workflows to keep up with an ever-increasing amount of samples.
For this reason instruments similar to the equipment, which originally has been designed to accelerate the process of Drug Discovery, now commonly are being used for parallel Sample Preparation, Pretreatment, Digestion and Analysis.
Multiple dispensing of solid and liquid samples, sample treatment with corrosive chemicals under harsh conditions, work-up steps like filtration & SPE purification are only some of the most relevant workflow steps.
Other technical requirements to these instruments might strongly differ from workflow to workflow. Generally a diverse set of complex unit operations needs to be automated, which are characteristic to each individual workflow.
For this reason only flexible, highly modular, and scalable equipment has the chance of covering the complex automation needs of this emerging field.
Using selected examples, from the ?Biofuels & Renewable Energy? R&D, this presentation will show how a variety of challenging parallel workflows fully have been automated.