Date: Wed, 22 May 2019 20:59:16 +0000
Howdy Spinlanders
I wanted to thank everyone who wrote to share their ideas and experiences with spinners and automation. We took these suggestions to make a starting point/rules for how we would do things. This was so much better then starting from scratch. Many of you had similar stories and suggestions but we really did steal Johannes Liermann’s spinner rack and ideas from Peter Thompson and Dean Olson on color coding and removing/storing user samples that were removed from the auto samples.
Several people indicated having to remove samples regularly, and that some facilities have spinners "walk off" and they have to go hunting them. Most everyone agrees not to leave the spinners in the sample changers but some do. Many people also mentioned the spinners breaking if dropped, already had this happen once.
In our training sessions we do emphasis not dropping the spinners, and don’t walk off with them. We also spend a lot of time reminding users to not remove other users samples and to come get their NMR tubes! Users lack of picking up their sample tubes has been our biggest challenge. We give away about 60 tubes a week, several labs will probably never buy NMR tubes again!
We have been running now since late November 2018, and have changed procedures and policies a few times. Currently this is how we are running our 2 systems in full IconNMR mode:
Every morning we remove samples from the auto samplers if they are done. These are kept in numbered racks that we rotate. Samples that are still in the lab after 3 days are given away as free NMR tubes. So racks are labeled with colored tags that we switch out. They say something like “ Samples Removed on Monday to be given away on Thursday if not removed”.
There is a 30 minute time limit per experiment during the daytime.
1 spectrometer runs in day/night queue 7 days a week. Night is from 10pm to 8am there is a 4hour limit per user.
The 2nd spectrometer runs in day/night queue 5 days a week and on Weekends Night queue can run in day time hours if the system is idle. Night queue is from 8pm to 8am on this system with a 6 hour limit.
Currently these systems run 140-200 experiments a day between them and routinely have over 100 unique users a month.
We had a raised platform made to go in front of the systems. The handrail is still being built, and eventually stands will be put on the platform to hold the spinners and kim wipes.
I have attached pictures of our setup and responses to the original email below. A bit of humor, if you look closely between the 2 systems in the background you will see a Varian Mercury Console. This holds the UPS’s that power the 2 NEO consoles.
Again thank you all for your suggestions.
Greg
[cid:794D6113-F025-4B44-9C5D-9873DD274E79_at_chem.tamu.edu][cid:4F4BD461-BD55-42FE-AE51-821BDF600EDF_at_chem.tamu.edu][cid:39B8AEC3-EF90-4793-A7CA-9C2196CE6C86_at_chem.tamu.edu]
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We are more like a “Protein NMR lab” so we don’t have too many students (no undergrad) using our spectrometers. This being said, I only leave ONE spinner/shuttle per NMR instrument. This avoids having people trying to inset a second sample in the magnet.
I also tell people to leave the spinner on the table beside the computer. I don’t want them to put it on the table where they prepare their samples as it would contaminate the spinners.
Once, I had someone dropping a spinner and it broke a little piece of it ☹. I was not happy but to be honest this could potentially happen to anyone.
Only shuttles are in the sample changer.
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we have a table setup. I had our workshop build a 6 x 10 rack for 60 spinners at exactly the height for proper tube adjustment (I attached some pictures). It takes care that the spinners do not lie around in all places and also keeps people from throwing the depth gauge into the magnet. I hear that seemed to be an issue for some AMMRL users…
We too have around 300 users and I strongly recommend thorough training and clear procedures. It’s not the 295 people who behave well but the 5 people who don’t understand what they are doing that cause the most trouble.
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For our 2 SampleCase models, I bought enough spinner collars to fill all 24 positions, and the students have been trained to remove their sample(s) and return the spinner to the position it was taken from. This way I can tell at a glance if spinners are missing. None have disappeared, with a couple of year’s user experience. These are the blue collars with the yellow stripe.
For our 16 position SampleCaseExpress (carousel up at the top of the magnet) I have only six spinner collars. These are not left in the carousel, since without an nmr tube in place they sink down and are difficult to remove for subsequent use. I keep a box near the magnet fitted with a cutout section of the foam insert that the collars arrived in. Students are instructed to remove both tube and collar, and deposit collar into the box, when finished.
This lab does not require my constant presence, at least w.r.t. spinner loss. My visual inventory is also a great diagnostic for instances of collars left without a tube in the magnet. This causes of course a disturbance in the Force, that I have to come down and fix.
On the damage from dropping, this is the first time in many years that I have thought kindly about the college professors who thought it would be clever to carpet the NMR lab many years ago. For the most part I can give reasons galore not to do this, but the protection of dropped spinner collars is a contrary example I have not thought about!
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We built a table next to the magnet:
https://chem.umn.edu/research/facilities/nmr/instruments
I would not recommend keeping spinners in the sample changer since the sensors detect the spinner, not the sample. So if someone enters an incorrect number, an empty spinner will go into the magnet. They're light enough that they do eject, but why take the risk?
yes, the fingers do break off. Bruker seemed unaware that their manufacturing process changed at some point. The spinners we got in 2011 are far more robust (thicker fingers) than those we got in 2015. A stray comment I made to our sales rep generated some high level discussions about it, but I don't know if that resulted in a change in their manufacturing. I have a little bucket of broken spinners, maybe a dozen out of 60, since 2015.
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My box of spinners slowly dwindled with time - mass emails would bring back a few and when, as part of training, I would discuss the cost of replacing the spinner, and set up a policy that spinners are to remain in the NMR room, disappearances did slow down. After 8 years or so I had half that I started with.
People put them in their pocket and forget, or break and throw them away, or hoard them because there are never enough spinners for their project.
Maybe if we could implant RFID chips in them and set up a very loud alarm with 007 style flashing lights when someone tries to leave the room with one... :-)
I imagine that keeping the spinners in one place - especially as you suggest in the changer (is that possible? Ask Bruker if there might be any issues) where it is very visible might work to minimize losses. I kept them in the original storage box.
I thought about it a bit - I haven’t tried this - maybe make people own the spinners - literally. Assign a set to each group with instructions on how they can order more. Then they will be responsible for their own spinner and their loses. Should a group need to borrow, have some on hand and require it be returned in a certain time or they get charged. Or just charge them. If you have no means to charge maybe there is some other enticement that could be thought of. Of course this depends on how many groups and spinners there are (and your budget). NMR policy.
But then there might be complaints about other groups taking spinners... (ID them by mark with a Sharpie?)
Oh - why didn’t I try that? I have a Samplejet, and at the time I was deciding on buying more spinners or upgrading to a new carousel which didn’t use spinners (it uses one very different type of spinner that is almost always in the magnet and the system puts the tube in automatically). Price for upgrade or getting more spinners were on par so I went with the upgrade.
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we have a 60-slot autosampler. We leave it filled with spinners. Our bigger problem is that folks forget to take their samples with them when they leave.
Of course, a master key is helpful too, to find the lab that squirreled away 5 spinners and forgot about them!! (Not that that happened to us.....well, maybe it did.)
We broke our first one last spring when one of my students dropped it. I think it's the first we broke in 4 years.
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Our users usually don't run more than 5 samples a time so I leave 5-6 spinners out at each NMR. Occasionally there are losses and I then take out a couple more. It has not been bad. I guess the situation at your place is probably not too different from UMass.
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We have a couple systems that run similarly. I've kind of given up on being able to regulate too closely the spinner usage. We just keep them out next to the spectrometers. Every once in a while I'll see one up in a student's wet lab, and it's on such occasions that I sit on the student pretty hard. Typically I'll be pretty serious with them about the cost of the spinners, and then either find the faculty supervisor directly or send them an email with the student CC's describing the problem with costs. That percolates about the student population, and does help get the students to behave better.
My biggest concern with the blue spinners is how intolerant they are of solvent and fingerprints. So we use really strong words during training about never getting solvent of any type on the spinners, and never touching them except on the upper portions.
I once thought about replacing all the blue spinners with white ones, as the white ones are so much sturdier. But the cost, and the fact that (at least) our SampleXpress really doesn't much like the white spinners (many more errors with them than with the blue spinners) has kept me from doing that.
We have 80 blue spinners supporting 4 spectrometers. I probably replace 10 of them per year on average. Maybe not quite that many? Have 40 white spinners, used mostly for VT. Replaced almost none of them over 5 years. But they are used much less often.
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Congrats on the new systems. We have a similar situation in our facility. We have the spinner cases set on a desk/bench next to the workstation PC (though next to the magnet may be an even better location) and users place the spinners back in the case after picking up their sample. I would not recommend leaving the spinners in the sample changer. They are difficult to get out without a sample in them, and it seems like a recipe for broken tubes and unnecessary torque on the magnet and sample changer if students try to insert the tube into the spinner while it remains in the sample changer.
A few other considerations:
-Have you identified an easy way to remove samples that have been left too long? We are trying a sticker system (different colors for the days of the week).
-If you are planning on running in Icon while still having a "walk-up" feel, make sure you coach the users that they'll need to add ~3-5 minutes/sample to account for the time spent on equilibrating temp, tuning, locking, shimming, and automatic gain setting.
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Please keep us posted on this topic, since we also struggle with spinners disappearing occasionally.
We have a table set up for sample preparation and spinner storage near the spectrometer. We do not leave spinners in the sample changer.
Occasionally I send out mass emails to users asking them to look for spinners in their lab, sometimes I get a couple back.
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We used to have loads "disappearing" spinners too. This was the result of two things:
(1) Not enough spinners! The second you get into a situation where students can't find a spinner, then they will steal them (which leads to fewer spinners, which leads to more stealing, ad infinitum). So make sure you have more than enough AND make sure they are aware of this, so there is no incentive to steal them. Having a dozen spare spinners will save your life in this respect......
(2) Culture. Students get into the habit of hoarding and don't break this unless forced. Once we had enough spinners, we went around the labs once, searched in drawers etc and wherever we found hoarded spinners we recovered them and clearly informed people that: (i) there was no need to steal them anymore AND (ii) there would be penalties if they did so again in future. It was a half-day well spent. Nowadays only a very few new post-docs will steal spinners - and they soon learn it's a waste of their time....
All of this is in an environment where each student just comes into our lab, takes a spinner (unloading a completed sample from the robot if there aren't any spare spinners) and loads their sample, submits it to automation and forgets about it until they recover the sample. So basically spinners are "stored" on the robot or on the bench next to the robot once the sample is removed - they never need to leave the instrument area.
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I’ve got a setup similar to yours – lots of users (not quite as many!) and a SampleXpress. I don’t count spinners (probably should!) but I have had users bring me spinners saying that they’ve found them in their labs. I don’t think it happens often. Spinners dropping on the floor is a bigger problem and now I’ve got the spinners positioned very close to the Sample Xpress so there isn’t much chance of them being carried across the lab. I recommend a carpet anyway, though.
You won’t be able to keep spinners in a SampleXpress. They sit in pretty tightly and they’re a pain to get out – I think you have to spear them with an NMR tube!
One annoying thing is that the SampleXpress generates blue dust (I think it’s the sides of the SampleXpress wearing down), but it doesn’t seem to have many consequences.
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We have a SampleXpress; that’s the 60-sample automated cassette. Yes, students, and even staff, will sometimes drop and irreversibly damage a spinner. The only solution would be to put a piece of carpeting under the work area where samples are loaded in the spinners. Students do not generally admit this accident, and you might expect that particular spinner to just disappear. Spinners are about $140 each from Bruker.
We have a plastic cart on wheels set up near the magnet for placing samples in spinners.
We do not leave the spinners in the cassette.
We remove samples on a regular basis for users, and put them in a succession of containers for pick-up.
Blue spinners are returned to a rack for future use.
O-rings on the spinners can become loose over time. We replace them with McMaster-Carr #1283N198.
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Gregory P. Wylie, Ph.D
NMR Facility Manager
Texas A&M University
Department of Chemistry
P.O. Box 30012
College Station, TX 77842-3012
gregory.wylie_at_chem.tamu.edu<mailto:gregory.wylie_at_chem.tamu.edu>
979.458.0705 (voice)
979.845.4719 (fax)
706.206.0007 (cell)
http://nmr.tamu.edu
On Sep 24, 2018, at 9:37 AM, Wylie, Gregory P <gpwylie_at_tamu.edu<mailto:gpwylie_at_tamu.edu>> wrote:
Howdy Spinlanders
We will have 2 new Bruker 400 system up an running soon. Each will have 60 position sample changers. There will be ~300+ trained users for these 2 systems, and no constant supervision of the systems.
I am looking for suggestion on how you manage your spinners? We have had a few spinners wonder off in the past and have heard reports of users breaking the bottom fingers off of the Bruker spinner by dropping them.
Do you have a table set up for loading spinners and storage? If so where?
Or
Do you leave the spinners in the sample changer?
Any other issues you may have had or would like to warm us about is greatly appreciated as well.
Thank you
Greg
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Gregory P. Wylie, Ph.D
NMR Facility Manager
Texas A&M University
Department of Chemistry
P.O. Box 30012
College Station, TX 77842-3012
gregory.wylie_at_chem.tamu.edu<mailto:gregory.wylie_at_chem.tamu.edu>
979.458.0705 (voice)
979.845.4719 (fax)
706.206.0007 (cell)
http://nmr.tamu.edu
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