Laboratory
The clean room
The room is constantly in positive pressure, ventilated by filtered air through two large HEPA filters. This makes sure minimal particles enters into the room. The particle counts for this room is <10particles/m3. The room is also constructed with minimal metal pieces, except supportive structures. One flow bench is dedicated for water filtration.
We installed 2 flow benches inside the clean room, which ensures extra clean environment for sensitive metal analysis.
The typical vortex mixer and centrifuge. Electrochemistry set up is also fully installed in the lab, which provides metal-ligand analysis.
The trace metal clean water system
The trace metal clean water system ensures constant supply of clean water on daily basis. The system is built up from a MilliQ water system fed by DI water, and we introduced 3 additional purification for extra cleanness. The DI water passes through ultrafiltration column, organic remoral column, and cation remocal column sequentially and catragesfinally feed into the MilliQ water purification system.
An overview of the clean water system.
A close look of the purification catrages.
A close look of the MilliQ system.
The ICP-QQQ
An Agelent 8800 triple quad ICP-MS (ICP-QQQ) will be installed in our lab in Janurary 2017. The triple quad ICP-QQQ has high sensitivity with an additional quadrupole operates as a mass filter, which allows the analysis of tricky elements like Fe. We will use this instrument to measure Pb, Fe, Zn, Mn, Cd and Cu in seawater concentrates through isotope dilution.
X-Vane
X-Vane is a sampling assembly combiling a Niskin-X bittle and titanium frame vane for trace metal sampling. It was invented by Zhang et al. (2015, pdf) to sample trace metal clean water from a vessel without an A-frame. This allows more sampling opportunities known the basic field instrumentation in Southeast Asia. The samples taken by X-Vanes show indifferentiable results for dissoved Fe/Al/Mn concentration compare to MITESS vanes.
A. Photograph of the X-vane sampler at sea, illustrating the titanium “ weather vane ” frame with the 5-L Niskin-X bottle; B. top plan view of X-Vane schematic diagram with parts identi fi ed; C. side plan view of X-Vane schematic diagram with parts identified. Picture from Zhang et al. (2015)