a nice end to a productive week at work
I am home from a delightful evening at Frostheim. There were six of us this week. Both of my apprentices, the husband of my senior apprentice, two of the other students, and myself. While there I managed to help one of the boys cut a rectangle of lovely blue wool into a fantasy pirate cloak with collar, taught one of my apprentices to do nålbinding with the beautiful stone needle lord_kjar made for her (she is also a geologist), made a wool rim for the Lucia crown that she will be wearing for our choir Lucia performance next week, and had a delightful time visiting with people.
After the meeting I did some grocery shopping and after I got home participated in an unexpected defrosting of one of the downstairs freezers when we discovered that its door no longer shut properly due to one of the drawers not having been put back properly last time it was opened, which caused huge amounts of ice to build up between the drawers and the door. oops. Luckily the contents all fit into the other freezers (well, except for the 3 plastic bottles of ice, which we don't actually need till the next time we want to take food along in an ice chest.
Work this week has been good, but long. This was the week that one of the guys from the company that sold us the ICP-MS was here to do training and troubleshooting of the issues we had been having with the system. We discovered several things that, together, seem to explain why we were getting such low signal. There were some small leaks in the tubing connecting the Laser to the ICP-MS. Fixing those, however, didn't bring the signal back up to where it should be. Then we noticed that the laser isn't actually firing at full strength anymore. It used to be that when we asked for 7 J/cm^2 we actually got that much energy reported. However, these days that setting gives only just over 4 J/cm^2. So we tried putting the request in terms of % laser energy, and discovered that to get 7 J/cm^2 out of it we need to ask it for about 60% power. Doing this, AND all of the minor changes to default settings that he made while he was here, and now the laser and ICP-MS are playing nicely together again--the signal strength is as good as it was some months ago before we first started having issues.
We even switched back and forth between solutions mode and laser ablation mode, and each time we got the signal back to where it should be straight away. I am hopeful that it will still have good signal on Monday when the service/training guy isn't here anymore. Wish me luck.
After the meeting I did some grocery shopping and after I got home participated in an unexpected defrosting of one of the downstairs freezers when we discovered that its door no longer shut properly due to one of the drawers not having been put back properly last time it was opened, which caused huge amounts of ice to build up between the drawers and the door. oops. Luckily the contents all fit into the other freezers (well, except for the 3 plastic bottles of ice, which we don't actually need till the next time we want to take food along in an ice chest.
Work this week has been good, but long. This was the week that one of the guys from the company that sold us the ICP-MS was here to do training and troubleshooting of the issues we had been having with the system. We discovered several things that, together, seem to explain why we were getting such low signal. There were some small leaks in the tubing connecting the Laser to the ICP-MS. Fixing those, however, didn't bring the signal back up to where it should be. Then we noticed that the laser isn't actually firing at full strength anymore. It used to be that when we asked for 7 J/cm^2 we actually got that much energy reported. However, these days that setting gives only just over 4 J/cm^2. So we tried putting the request in terms of % laser energy, and discovered that to get 7 J/cm^2 out of it we need to ask it for about 60% power. Doing this, AND all of the minor changes to default settings that he made while he was here, and now the laser and ICP-MS are playing nicely together again--the signal strength is as good as it was some months ago before we first started having issues.
We even switched back and forth between solutions mode and laser ablation mode, and each time we got the signal back to where it should be straight away. I am hopeful that it will still have good signal on Monday when the service/training guy isn't here anymore. Wish me luck.