System Suitability Testing (SST)

Instruments deteriorate with time: columns need replacement, detectors require recalibration, etc. To detect when it’s time for maintenance, we must do testing on a regular basis - System Suitability Testing.

The way it works is the following:

  1. We regularly inject a known compound with a known concentration with the same instrument configuration and the method

  2. And see if its Retention Time, Area, RSD and other metrics are within the acceptable boundaries

This routine is repeated on a regular basis (e.g. daily). Ideally, we’d like to see a chart showing how our metrics change with time.

Peaksel capabilities

Peaksel allows batch-level visualizations that show the trends that can explain the instrument health. For this, every new SST injection needs to end up in the same batch. You can add User-defined Props, like Maintenance Comments each time you change the configuration of the instrument:

Future plans:

  • Creating dynamic batches so that users don’t have to manually modify SST batches

  • Ability to leave comments right on the chart. E.g. a possible comment could be "the column was replaced". This way we’ll see how the stats change with time, possibly notice that the deviation increases, and then there’s a comment saying "maintenance", after which we see that the deviation decreased.