A New Automated Approach for Testing Contaminated Soil?

Earlier I mentioned that we had developed a new Robotic Centrifuge which we had used in the development of our plant Metabolomics sample preparation workstation and Automated QuEChERS clean-up workstation solutions.

Well, if we could only develop a version of the Robotic Centrifuge which could Vortex mix and Centrifuge 10ml magnetic top vials we might also be able to extract Contaminated Soil and analyse it in an on-line fashion.

I visit many Environmental Testing Laboratories who run many thousands of soil extractions per year to help their clients, the Contaminated Land Remediation companies who subsequently help building contractors to clean up sites ready for new building projects. If we could only help these labs enhance productivity and turn round the samples more quickly, the land remediation companies and builders could get on with their work and allow the build to complete in a timely fashion and without the additional expense of heavy plant machinery sitting idle.

The 10ml version of the Centrifuge was completed recently and we decided to start work on an extraction of PAH’s from contaminated soil as a taster to introduce the concept. You will start to see some of the results appearing on Paul’s applog as we make progress in this area.

We hope to use this new on-line Soil Extraction and Analysis Workstation to greatly improve productivity, reduce errors, virtually eliminate sample preparation costs and ensure a rapid turn around of sample results for testing laboratories and their customers.

If you think this approach has merit and you would like to us to work with you to develop a new approach, please contact me on 01954 212909 or at bob.green@anatune.co.uk