Costs of laboratory consumables have risen dramatically over the last 20 years, whether it's reagents, chemicals or services the laboratory budget is being hit harder than ever.

A modern laboratory not only has to worry about financial costs, but there is also an increasing awareness of the cost of equipment downtime. Analytical instrumentation is a significant investment in a modern laboratory, and scientists are becoming more sensitive to the genuine cost of downtime of that equipment.

When it comes to gas chromatography (GC), typical downtimes are experienced when;

  • Carrier gas cylinder is empty.
  • Where external in-line purifiers are used, whenever one of the purifiers becomes saturated and replaced.

The good news is that high purity gas cylinder technology has moved on, the next generation of cylinders are available with integrated BIP® technology. Available exclusively from Air Products, BIP® technology cylinders have a cleverly integrated purification system, which eliminates the requirement for inline purifiers. Resulting in an obvious financial saving for the laboratory, whilst also reducing the amount of downtime for your GC.

Another less evident financial benefit of moving to BIP® cylinder technology is that of more usable gas per cylinder. It is widely known to chromatographers that as the cylinder pressure drops below a certain level, contaminants particularly moisture, desorb from the cylinder wall. In traditional cylinders this leads to an increase in the overall impurity levels in the gas, in order to avoid this phenomena users switch to a new full cylinder. But by using a BIP® cylinder, these desorbed impurities are easily removed allowing scientists to use gas to a point beyond which they would typically switch cylinders. The result is potentially up to 20% more usable gas for each cylinder.

Switching to a BIP® technology cylinder couldn't be easier, just order BIP® gases in place of your normal carrier gas and see the benefits immediately.