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This site produces packaging plastics for use in the beverage and food packing industry. Columbia Operations is the largest manufacturer of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) polymers in the U.S

Alex runs a QC lab serving the production facility. It operates 24/7, testing samples of final product (pellets) as well as intermediate products (liquid or solid). Operators are unskilled and the system must be foolproof and rugged. They purchased 2 systems so that one could be always available as a backup.

The testing process involves 2 heated reactions with cooldown steps in between. The first is a hydrolysis reaction of the product together with an internal standard at 115 degrees. During this process pellets are dissolved. After a cooldown period, a derivitizing reagent is added followed by another heated incubation at 80 degrees. The derivitized reactants are then injected onto a GC for analysis.

A balance is used to check that a minimum weight of product is in the original vial. If not the sample is skipped. The samples are barcoded at the time the sample list is set up. At runtime the scanned barcode is compared to the expected barcode and if there is a mis-match then the sample is skipped.

LEAP Shell handles the sample scheduling of each of the 5 stages of the process, overlapping them all and filling up both agitators according to the available time between operations. It also handle barcode and weight validation as well as data logging.

The system is mounted on an Agilent GC (System 1 on a 6850, and System 2 on a 6890). Chemstation has been integrated by the customer using the Chemstation macro capabilities. Their macro picks  up a file written for each sample by LEAP Shell and starts the GC run.