Isotope analysis of gases, liquids, and carbonate minerals
iso FLOW is a fully automated, continuous flow preparation system for the isotopic analysis of samples which have been prepared into septum sealed vials. These samples can be derived from a diverse range of application areas such as geoscience, climate change, food adulteration, hydrology, and clinical studies, thereby ensuring that the iso FLOW is one of the most flexible sample preparation systems for isotope ratio mass spectrometry.
The iso FLOW system has unique analytical advantages for the isotopic analysis of liquid and carbonate samples compared to other commonly used techniques. For example, the equilibration technique is advantageous for the analysis of δ2H and δ18O water isotopes compared to direct injection into an elemental analyzer because there are no deleterious effects of dissolved or particulate organic compounds in the water. This is ideal for the analysis of samples such as fruit juices, wines, urine and river or estuarine waters which have substantial organic contents and so filtering or distillation of samples prior to analysis is not required.
The analysis of pure carbonate materials can be analyzed using dual inlet technology, but this is not ideal for impure carbonate samples such as apatite carbonates due to the presence of hydroxyapatite which can cause an interference after acid digestion. In this case, the iso FLOW is uniquely capable of analyzing these samples thanks to the UltiTrap GC separation column which purifies the sample prior to isotopic analysis.