Flow Analyzer System Restoration and Innovation

Have you ever found yourself staring at your flow analyzer wishing, that like a vintage automobile, it could be fully restored?  Though SFA/FIA technology has actually changed very little over the last few decades, it is usually more cost effective to restore your existing equipment than to spend more money on a new replacement.

A flow analyzer can take a lot of abuse over time and still provide fairly reliable results to a point. Errors will accumulate over time from a variety of causes including, to name few, valve wear, cracked and worn fittings, chemical scaling, irregular pump speeds caused by worn bearings and/or cracked gears, auto sampler problems and more.  All of these can contribute to signal noise and irregular peak shapes or just plain bad results, in turn, affecting your root-mean-square deviation (RSD). Poor Results!

A good restoration will not only return your system to original factory specifications, but to current platform specifications and tolerances. In the photo below you see an original V-100 valve (left) used in O.I. Analytical‘s FS3000 (Alpkem) auto analyzer. V-100 parts are no longer available so we have taken a current generation 6-port injection valve body (right) and modified it to work in the older FS3000 chassis. As an extra bonus this valve will also work in the current FS3100 platform.

This modification produces a far superior valve with none of the problems associated with the older style valve body such as bulk head fittings that can crack, tubing that can clog or wear out, as well as difficulty in performing maintenance or repairs.

This is one example of how upgrading, reconditioning and performing preventative maintenance can increase the life of your current platform, increase the profit from the original investment and save money for more important aspects of your busy laboratory.  Here at EZkem, we have been repairing and restoring Perstorp, Alpkem, and O.I. Analytical flow analyzers for more than 20 years. We provide a quick turnaround service that will minimize downtime and return your equipment to current operating standards.