Automation and handling

The plough cannot be allowed to reach too close to the cloth and some residual cake remains. Where this is not acceptable, the cake may be removed by a pneumatic system, by vacuum, or by reslurrying. The cycle can be automated and controlled by timers. The maximum speeds of basket centrifuges vary from 800 to 1500 rpm, and basket diameters are in the range from 10 to 1400 mm. A 1200-mm diameter, 750-mm long basket may handle as much as 200 kg of cake in one charge. 

Zinc. The electrowinning of zinc on a commercial scale started in 1915. Most newer faciUties are electrolytic plants. The success of the process results from the abiUty to handle complex ores and to produce, after purification of the electrolyte, high purity zinc cathodes at an acceptable cost. Over the years, there have been only minor changes in the chemistry of the process to improve zinc recovery and solution purification. Improvements have been made in the areas of process instmmentation and control, automation, and prevention of water pollution. 

An air valve, sometimes called the air-activated valve, is widely used for automated food handling operations. Although electronic or electric control boxes may be a part of the system, the valve itself generally is air-activated, and is more reflable than other types. Air-operated valves are used for in-place cleaning systems, and for the transfer and flow control of various products. 

In coupled LC-GC, specific components or classes of components of complex mixtures are pre-fractionated by LC and are then transferred on-line to a GC system for analytical separation. Because of the ease of collecting and handling liquids, off-line LC-GC techniques are very popular, but they do present several disadvantages, e.g. the numerous steps involved, long analysis times, possibility of contamination, etc. The on-line coupled LC-GC techniques avoid all of these disadvantages, thus allowing us to solve difficult analytical problems in a fully automated way. 

High-throughput screening of molecular catalysts using automated liquid handling, injection and microdevices, Ghimia 56, 11 (2002) 621-626. 

For PMMA/additive dissolutions, it was not possible to identify any additive characteristic mass peaks, either by direct laser desorption or with matrix-assistance (dithranol, DHBA or sinapinic acid, 4-hydroxy-3,5-dimethoxy-cinnamic acid). This has again been ascribed to very strong interaction between PMMA and additives, which suppresses desorption of additive molecules. Also, partial depolymerisation of pho-tolytically labile PMMA by laser irradiation may play a role, which leads to saturation of the detector by PMMA fragment-ions and disappearance of additive mass peaks below noise level. Meyer-Dulheuer [55] has also reported MALDI-TOFMS analysis of a coating/2-ethylhexyldiphenylphosphate sample. Quantitative determination of the additives by means of MALDI-ToFMS proved impossible. Possibly the development of reproducible (automated) sample handling procedures or thin films might overcome this problem. 

On the other hand, this approach has a number of advantages. Many different design options can be considered at the same time. The complex multiple trade-offs usually encountered in chemical process design can be handled by this approach. Also, the entire design procedure can be automated and is capable of producing designs quickly and efficiently. 

Flow NMR has recently been eclipsed by the advent of robotic sample handling systems capable of dealing with very small sample quantities and volumes. We now have a system operating in our laboratory that makes up samples directly into 1 mm NMR tubes, using only about 8 ul of solvent. These can be run under automation and the tubes emptied back into the plate wells by the same robot. This technology offers superior performance and largely gets around the problems of contamination and recovery. 

Lloyd et al.1 described automation processes for compound optimization and simultaneous implementation of (1) a LIMS system to automate and track the flow of sample information, data analysis, and reporting (2) an automated data archiving system to handle a large number of LC/ MS/MS data files (3) custom software to track a large number of protocol flows and (4) workstation automation. 

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