Hi there fellow spinlanders,
This e-mail has been a long time coming, since our move here at the
University of Vermont happened well over half a year ago. I received a
lot of advice from many of you, and I thank you for that, and I am so
glad to be done with facility planning issues AND planning of the move
of two NMR spectrometers into our new STEM (Discovery hall) building.
The moves were quite costly, and we decided to order cryogens separately
through our local cryogens provider (AirGas, which is now supposedly Air
Liquide).
Our building was not quite ready, although everything pertaining to the
NMR facility was more or less ready, and UVM refused to push the move
date forward. The newer Bruker Avance III HD spectrometer with a 500MHz
Ascend magnet move came first. The first Bruker technician, Peter
Demou, arrived as scheduled, and did an excellent job benchmarking and
decommissioning the magnet, and took approximately 3 days. The
following week the Bruker magnet guy, Kevin Gionet arrived, spent a few
hours packing up the magnet, which was moved the same day. He then
spent the rest of the week setting up the magnet and cooling the magnet
down. The following week Igor Shmelev arrived to power up the magnet,
top off LHe, and do the cryogen shims, followed by RT shims and
benchmarking of the system. He was *extremely* careful with powering up
the magnet, and we were very fortunate to have no training quenches
(this magnet had at least 2 training quenches when it was initially
energized 5 years ago). It seemed that he was topping off the magnet
with LHe every chance he got. In the end, we were down to under 50L of
LHe, from 500L total, which was supposed to cover 1 training quench.
Overall, the move was seamless, and the spectrometer was back up and
running in under 3 weeks! We had considered doing a cold move, which
would have saved us about half the money, but had decided that the risks
were too great for that.
Unfortunately a couple of days after the instrument was up and running,
there was a flood in the lab, because the construction crew didn't turn
off the building chiller water over the weekend (and had used hoses and
a clamp for 'balancing the system') and there's a chiller room in my lab
(the X-ray diffractometers are in my lab too!). When they came in
Monday morning, water was gushing from under the lab door! Because we
had had carpet installed in the lab, it prevented the water from flowing
through the entire lab, so the flood stopped just before it reached the
magnet and didn't get into the corner of the lab where the console was
located. Phew!
That same day John Davidson of CIS showed up to move our Varian
Unity/Inova 500 MHz spectrometer. He subcontracted a console guy to do
the benchmarking, but did everything else himself. The Oxford 500/51
magnet was discharged the same day as his arrival and then warmed up
within a couple of days, then packed and moved into the new building.
He also un-cabled everything and moved the console and components into
the new lab. The magnet was immediately assembled, then sat over the
weekend. Once John returned, he started the cooling process which took
under 48h, then came the energization and cryo-shimming. Fortunately no
training quenches with this magnet either! Once all the cryo-shims were
within spec, John took off and his console guy Uresh Parikh arrived to
re-cable the console and do the RT shims and bench mark the system.
Shimming proved to be a bit of a challenge, since we do have a
Unity-Inova with only Z-axis gradients. Uresh was able to build a 3D
gradient map, which helped significantly. The shims went out a bit over
the weekend, and I was unable to get them honed in, so Uresh was able to
VNC in to my system and touch up the shims. Amazingly linewidth values
ended up being better than I had ever seen them before! With
50%/0.55%/0.11% at 0.78Hz/2.70Hz/5.04Hz, for which I was VERY happy (I
had not been able to get the 0.55% below 7.5Hz in the past). In the
first few months, the x-shim was a bit unstable, though it has calmed
down a bit since then.
Our magnet moves were staggered, so as to maximize accessibility for
researchers during the move. Some of the weeks there wasn't much
research being done anyway, since they were moving their own research
labs, and not generating NMR samples.
If you are slated for a NMR facility move, I highly recommend both
Bruker and John Davidson to assist you in this move. Both were very
professional, took extra care in packing the system, and setting up the
spectrometers in both labs. Both went the extra mile to ensure the
spectrometers were working to my standards and that I was satisfied with
the performance after the move. If you are slated for a NMR facility
move, please don't hesitate to contact me with questions and I'd be
happy to share my experiences and suggestions.
Hope to see many of you at the Orlando ENC!
Cheers,
Monika
--
Monika Ivancic, PhD
NMR Facility Manager (W103A)
Department of Chemistry
82 University Pl.
University of Vermont
Burlington, VT 05405
(802) 656-0285 office
Monika.Ivancic_at_uvm.edu
Received on Thu Mar 01 2018 - 10:57:58 MST