Thank you very much for all the responses, including those that shared
pictures of your setup.
In our case, we had already a backup nitrogen cylinder piped into the
Prodigy as part of the installation but the controller was switching to
warmup mode after 10 minutes. It turned out that Bruker was able to
modify the settings to extend that delay to 1h through a remote
TeamViewer session. It is good to know that those settings are not set
in stone thought there seemed no obvious way to modify them as a user.
As long we do noyt run into issues with our sample changer that are
related to fluctuations of compressed air pressure, or longer unplanned
pressure drops this may well be a sufficient solution.
Several of those responding use compressed nitrogen cylinders or a
pressurized liquid nitrogen cylinders hooked up to the main compressed
air/nitrogen through one way valve at slightly lower pressure as backup,
care must be taken to also have a one way valve to the outside to
prevent the backup cylinder supplying the rest of the building.
I got mixed responses regarding operating your own air compressor, some
said it was a big pain and others felt it worked fine for them, but they
require regular maintenance and one needs to budget for the maintenance
costs (3-5k US$/year).
Some preferred a nitrogen generator over using using liquid nitrogen
boiloff for cost reasons. There were cases where the central storage
tank did not provide sufficient pressure with th eneed for an additional
compressor, but also cases where boioff nitrogen was used from a tank
several buildings away. So as usual, the best solution depends on many
factors, like size of the facility and overall campus infrastructure.
Thanks again for all the replies.
Holger
Received on Fri Apr 27 2018 - 08:20:22 MST