Accelerated lifetime testing with real-time Early Maintenance Feedback (EMF) diagnostic monitoring on the 6475 triple quadrupole LC/MS

To help alleviate concerns on instrument health and longevity, the new Agilent 6475 triple quadrupole LC/MS system was designed with onboard intelligence that actively reports on the instrument health and status through Early Maintenance Feedback (EMF).

EMF reports various aspects pertaining to instrument maintenance such as “last tuned”, number of samples injected, number of diverter valve switches, last rough pump oil change, last gas filter change, and real time reports on detector health, nebulizer blockage, ion injector blockage, and spray stability status.

Here we present a use case to trigger Early Maintenance Feedback (EMF) events to simulate heavy instrument use through 10,000 sample injections of spiked bovine urine. The sample matrix was specifically chosen due the challenging endogenous components that may cause measurement issues (salts, metabolites, fats, proteins, etc…).

As this is not a true analytical method, the intention of this poster is primarily to stress the Early Maintenance Feedback mechanisms, test the instrument’s

response to heavy matrix accumulation, stability of tune parameters, and recovery of instrument tuning if out of spec.