Maintaining Instruments

Overview

An instrument is a piece of equipment used in the laboratory in the process of analysis.

An instrument may be a non-analysing piece of equipment whose details require management. for example, a mill, or it may be a device for analysing samples for results, for example, an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) is a type of mass spectrometer capable of detecting metals and several non-metals at concentrations as low as one part in 1012 (part per trillion).

Some analytical instruments have the ability to transmit results via an RS-232 COM port or ASCII file. Instrument connection and decoding mechanisms are used to upload results to CCLAS.

Instruments can be associated with specific scheme capacities.

Instrument maintenance and calibration schedules are created to assist with instrument management.

Process

An Instrument Group is a collection of instruments.

Instrument Scope

Instruments are created with lab-scope. A laboratory can contain multiple instruments.

Properties of an Instrument

An instrument can have:

  • Details of its physical characteristics.
  • Multiple scheme capacities.

Use of Instruments

Instruments can be made members of various instrument groups to denote those instruments capable of performing the analysis.

Samples located for batching can be assigned to an instrument from the given instrument group.

During collection of results from an instrument, the instrument is updated on the sample scheme analyte, so it can be seen which instrument performed the analysis.

Instrument upload lists can be created and uploaded to instruments, to assist with the collection of analytical results.

Instrument maintenance and calibration schedules can be created, and marked off when they are completed along with any additional notes or details.

Note: For creating, configuring or deleting instruments, refer to the CCLAS 6 Customisation Guide.