Hi all,
I'd appreciate your insight into an institutional policy matter:
whether to allow sample spinning.
I am told that, for years in our facility before I arrived, probe
inserts were being broken every few months, resulting in considerable
downtime and repair costs. Then the lab forbade users from spinning
their samples, and we haven't had a probe needing such repair since
the rule was implemented. We try to compensate for spinning's
lineshape benefit by ensuring that spinning isn't necessary; every
week someone touches up the nonspinning shims (X, Y, ...) and saves
the shims to a filename everyone knows about. On standard samples, the
differences we observe between spinning and nonspinning lineshapes is
not functionally significant for routine samples.
We now have a number of users who wish to spin their samples. While
several among this set would benefit slightly, we have a sizeable
number of less careful users who bake their NMR tubes to dry them,
sometimes resulting in banana tubes that would damage probes if they
were spun. I've observed some samples here that fail the Wilmad tube-
straightness-tester test (
http://www.wilmad-labglass.com/group/2099).
How is spinning handled at your facility? Does it pose problems for
you? How do you manage risk to your probes?
Thanks.
- Josh
Josh Kurutz, Ph.D.
Instructor and Senior Scientist for NMR
IMSERC, Chemistry Department
Northwestern University
2145 Sheridan Rd.
Evanston, IL 60208-3113
847-467-1949
fax: 208-978-2599
Facility: www.chem.northwestern.edu/imserc
NMR Blog: www.imserc-nmr.org
Twitter feed: twitter.com/imserc_nmr
Other: www.joshkurutz.com
Received on Mon Jul 26 2010 - 07:47:21 MST