I'd like to check gas chromatograph oven ramp rates quarterly in the year. Any thoughts on how to do this? Stopwatch and look at the display temp.? Thermocouple inside the oven and time?
The two instruments in question are the HP 5890II and the Agilent 6890. I want to be able to say, yes these instruments meet factory specfication. I realize heat ramp rates vary as oven temperature increase but I would want a general range 100 to 200 C. then maybe 200 to 300. Depends on how Agilent words their specs.
Thanks

I did oven cooling check with timer and recording temp display. Then plotted temp vs time. Slope (or 1st derivative) was the cooling rate at that temp.

Generally, my HP can handle a 25 deg celius/min rate dependably well from 40 degree C to 280 deg C

You could change your signal output to record the oven temperature. When you start a run, your "chromatogram" will be a plot of time (as usual) vs. oven temperature (instead of detector output). You can look at the plot to see if there are "obvious" deviations from linearity. To check for accuracy, you would need an independent (traceable) means to check the oven temperature.

Thanks for the ideas