Michael Ebitson
Michael has been practicing analytical chemistry for over 20 years which, combined with his 11 years at the company and his many years of service and customer support, provides him with a significant amount of experience in application areas such as environmental, food and beverage, pharmaceutical and industrial. Michael enjoys working closely with customers and coworkers using his knowledge and experience to assist them with their laboratory challenges and workflow hurdles.
If you have ever worked in an environmental laboratory, you might have heard of EPA method 1664B. Method 1664B is an extraction method with analysis by gravimetry that measures oil and grease in wastewater.
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If you are working in an environmental lab and encounter tissue samples and highly contaminated petroleum soil samples that create a lot of noise and interference on your analytical instruments, then you may need to apply an alumina cleanup to your workflow.
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No matter what your sample will be tested for, if you are extracting with liquid-liquid extraction (LLE), solid phase extraction (SPE), accelerated solvent extraction (ASE) or microwave, your sample's extracts will appear to look clean or dirty.
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If you have ever worked with samples in the food industry you must have run into the challenges of working with various matrices. Each of them ranging from gummies, flour and oils can keep providing challenges even when you have prepped the sample and it is about to go on the analytical instrument.
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If you are a chemist that is either a beginner or an expert in extracting per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) there are always going to be questions that come up after the extraction has taken place. Most often, questions occur at the concentration step. Such topics include water bath temperature, extract dryness, evaporation rates, and even water in the extract. How can one or all of the topics impact your analysis and where are good starting points?
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I can remember asking myself this question many years ago at my first environmental laboratory job. I was manually shaking out separatory funnels for EPA 625 and 608 and each sample looked drastically different from the next as I was pouring them into each separatory funnel. At the time, I thought the term wastewater meant anything that came from a sewer pipe and that it mainly consisted of human waste. When I looked deeper into the possible sample categories for these methods, I was very surprised by the different sample types required to be tested as wastewater. With that, it prompted me to ask myself well where does it come from?
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When learning that you may be transitioning to a newer revision of an EPA method some thoughts may come to mind such as: it took so long to perfect this sample preparation method, or I hope they have some improvements and or greater flexibility allowances in this revision. Well, that is exactly what we will touch upon in this blog post - sample preparation improvements.
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When working with regulated environmental methods have you ever asked yourself why are all these extracts concentrated down to one milliliter (mL) final volume? This is true for most soil and aqueous methods. Of course, a few methods will require a more diluted final volume but not many.
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Have you ever worked with new methods and said to yourself “yes I know what these internal standards and surrogates are measuring and when to add them to the samples”? Sounds familiar right? Well, I remember when I first started working in the laboratory and needed to fully understand and follow all method protocols and standard operating procedures (SOPs). One of the questions I asked was, what is the difference between method 525.2 and its internal standard and surrogates versus every other method we extract and analyze?
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Have you ever had days of extracting oil and grease samples and thought to yourself “there must be an easier way to work with wastewater samples”? Whether you run oil and grease samples by liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) or by solid-phase extraction (SPE) it can be challenging at times to efficiently extract 1-liter samples due to the sample matrix.
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