By SA on Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - 01:06 am:
Hi !!!
How do you clean your plugged solvent filters ???
Please don't say change with the new one. Cos I don't have any.
Thanks...
By Anonymous on Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - 02:36 am:
boil them 1 h in 4M HNO3 and neutralise afterwarts
By R.C. on Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - 06:07 am:
Umm...sorry, I can't fight it. Change to a new solvent filter, seriously. Boiling in nitric seems like more risk than it's worth.
You could sonicate a couple of times in methanol, changing the methanol each time, to try to remove imbedded particles.
Or you could do without solvent filters -- filter your eluent, flush the system, and hope for the best until you can get new solvent filters.
You could spend a little time asking yourself: "Why did they plug? Dust? Microbial growth? Never filtered eluent in the first place?" You might want to work on those.
We have inlet frits in the eluent bottles. The system has a frit after the pump, and there's a frit inside the autoinjector before the loop. If the system was validated with a frit before the column, it has one there -- otherwise we don't use it. We don't filter samples, but we're not using dirty samples.
But our frits don't clog unless someone gets sloppy with eluent prep.