Tips for Troubleshooting in Chromatography

  In an reputed pharma company, in IC system, XZ drive failure was observed.  Root cause analysis:  The system was shutdown for about 8 months. So initially it was not known that why such thing happened. Just as instrument was started and XZ drive failure took place. During investigation it was found that earthing observed as 2.4 ohms which is more than the requirement of NMT 1 ohms. Actually at the time of installation it was 1.4 ohms two years back. Due to increase in load, earthing increased upto 2.4 ohms which resulted in failure of XZ drive of IC instrument.  Cost of new drive is about $ 9000. Precaution: It is highly advisable to keep close check on earthing during operation of sophisticated instruments like IC system otherwise it can result in high costly affair.

Case study of Incident observed during HPLC analysis on Waters auto sampler:   Recently during HPLC analysis on Waters make HPLC, a very unique incident happened. During Related substance analysis, after 3 standard injection, in fourth injection missing vial was observed though injection was taken from same single vial. Root cause analysis: Further on investigation it was identified that at the time of vial labelling, analyst used small sticker. So at the time of vial picking by robot in autosampler, small piece of sticker on inside wall of vial carousol. Due to this robot tried to pick the vial but due to resistance from vial, robot was not able to pick the vial. This resulted in above incident and missing vial message was obseeved. On prima facie it was difficult to find the root cause but due to so small sticker, such sticker can cause the incident. Remedy :  Never apply sticker labels on vials and always use marker pen to assign the identification on vial. Hope you may get some hel