Thar Instruments, a Waters Company, will introduce its new Method Station II supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) system at next week's HPLC 2009 show in Dresden, Germany.
The Method Station II SFC is designed for high throughput and high resolution of demanding separations encountered in drug research and development. This new analytical system features a faster, higher capacity autosampler, a larger Analytical-2-Prep(tm) column oven, and new and improved software.
These features provide unprecedented flexibility in an instrument that has a smaller footprint and the same price as its predecessor. The Method Station II represents the first new analytical product introduced as a result of the recent merger with Berger Instruments, formerly a division of Mettler-Toledo AutoChem.
The new Analytical-2-Prep is the first column oven to accommodate multiple HPLC and SFC columns of different diameters. The oven's unique drawer design provides unprecedented flexibility to use up to 10 columns of two different diameters (4.6 mm and 10 mm, or 10 mm and 20 mm) simultaneously.
The novel oven thereby enables users to test different phases in the separation of their drug compounds without stopping and starting the instrument to change columns. The user simply designates column for automated analysis. This flexibility is extremely efficient and convenient for determining the optimal column and method for the separation of chiral and achiral compounds.
The system is further enhanced by easy-to-use software that allows maximum flexibility for control and method programming. The new Method Station II now integrates Chromeleon, ChemStation, and ChromScope software, giving users the flexibility to choose the most suitable software for their application or laboratory set up.
Being a green technology that offers many advantages, SFC is becoming the favorite normal phase technique for pharmaceutical R&D laboratories. Thar Instruments expects that the features and conveniences of the new Method Station II will encourage more scientists to switch from normal phase HPLC. The system utilizes CO2 as the mobile phase with a co-solvent resulting in faster equilibration, lower pressure drop and reduced solvent usage. The process is gentle on the stationary phase, reproducible and ideal for analytical or method development requirements for a wide range of applications.
Source: Thar Instruments
