Laboratory Evaluation of ATOMX Purge & Trap System

Just thought I'd share with you the recent experience with the Teledyne Tekmar ATOMX.
 
The Purge and Trap market in the UK has been quiet for some time, with most clients using Headspace for VOC analysis due to the sensitivity available on current MSD's. We do have a number of P&T users but these are still using some of the previous versions of Tekmar Purge & Trap.
We recently came up with an opportunity to evaluate and demo the ATOMX for a new low level requirement. The client wanted calibration and proof of LOD at the bottom calibration level of 0.1ug/L, but with a view to see below this level down to 0.01ug/L if possible.
The ATOMX demo unit arrived, we had the system out of the box and running samples within a couple of hours, it was so easy to set-up and get working.
Anyway, we set about proving the application and easily achieved the required calibration in the range 0.1 to 20ug/L for water samples. With replicates at 0.2ug/L giving RSD's under 20% and replicates at 2ug/L giving RSD's of better than 10%. This was done without any special optimisation, just running the suggested method and a 25ml sample volume. We believe 0.05ug/L to be possible on the set-up for nearly all compounds tested and sub that for most compounds, below this the addition of a cryo trap proves to further reduce detection limits but calibration of those early eluting compounds particularly Bromomethane and Chloromethene that elute at the same time as water might prove tricky.
We have succesfully carried out two successful customer demonstrations and hope to have at least one order in the coming month.
We realise this is early days, but at this stage the experince has been a good one.