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Are you obtaining any unusual results from your experiments? Continue reading to learn about some potential reasons and remedies.
When working with a quartz cuvette, there are a lot of things to consider. The cells can sometimes provide odd readings that make no sense. There might be several causes for this. We’ll go through some of the most basic difficulties that might sabotage your tests in this post.
#1 Clean Your Cuvettes
Let’s begin with the filthy cuvettes. Someone previously inquired about the types of readings they may get if they utilized a filthy cuvette. On a spectrophotometer, which measures how much light is absorbed, it’s reasonable to assume that a filthy cuvette will allow less light to reach the sample. As a result, the machine will see this as increased light absorption.
To put it another way, if the cuvette is filthy, the readings will be incorrect. Cleaning a cuvette is one of the most time-consuming and tedious tasks. Investing in a cuvette washer and reading our Quartz Cuvette Cleaning guide are two excellent methods to cut down on the time it takes to clean your cuvettes.
#2 Make Sure Your Quartz Cuvettes Are Dry
Most people who are in a hurry will not allow a cuvette to fully dry before using it. Leaving a cuvette half-filled with water or cleaning solution. This is a major issue. The test solution might be contaminated if there is water or a cleaning solution on the inside. It will also throw off your calculations when calculating the correct dilution.
There will be no contamination of the sample if the water or cleaning solution is on the exterior. The findings will be inaccurate if there is water/CS in the optical beam. Before placing a cuvette in the spectrophotometer, you must be absolutely confident that the exterior of the cuvette is totally dry.
Invest in a lens cloth and a can of compressed air to speed up the drying process. Simply flip the cuvette on its side (as seen in the photo on the left) and spray it with compressed air. Compressed air is beneficial because it dries out the corners of a quartz cuvette, which are prone to water accumulation.
Simply slip the cuvette between your fingers that are holding the lens cloth to utilize it. The thumb and pointer fingers work well for this, and you may dry two sides of a cuvette at once with this approach. After that, rotate the cuvette 90 degrees and repeat on the other two sides. It takes around 30 seconds to complete the compressed air and lens cloth procedure.
#3 Always Fill a Cuvette with a Pipette
You will eventually leak the sample on the outside of the cuvette and/or tilt the cuvette over, no matter how fine your pouring abilities are. Using an inexpensive plastic transfer pipette is quick, precise, and ensures that no liquid is spilled.
#4 – Use a Cuvette Rack
Using a cuvette rack and a transfer pipette is the best technique to fill a cuvette. If you utilize cuvettes, having a cuvette rack is essential. We wrote an entire essay about why a cuvette rack is so useful. The whole paper is linked below, but essentially, a cuvette rack adds stability to the process of filling quartz cuvettes. It also provides a handy and secure location for them to air dry.
Please direct to the page on the Cuvette Rack.
#5 – Always wear the gloves
“Eh, the glove box is too far across the lab to go there,” I say to myself. It won’t hurt if I only take up the cuvette with my bare hands once.” That one time develops into two… and then three… You can see where this is going.
Using your bare hands to pick up a quartz cuvette will contaminate the cell. Your hands’ oils and grime will transfer to the quartz. This means that the transmission characteristics of the optical surfaces will be affected by the oil and grime.
When odd readings appear in your tests, the cuvettes and spectrophotometer are most likely fine. So be sure you follow the basic guidelines above to save time and frustration.
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