Improving Signal to Noise Ratios

When signal to noise is too high to produce reproducible results, the settings on your instrument can sometimes be changed to give you acceptable results. You should consult your manual or contact your instrument company for a list of suggestions.

A real life example we experienced was with a lab that was having difficulty with integration of peak area while using CElixirOA (inverse detection and polarity) looking at organic acids and anions.

This customer was using a new Beckman MDQ™ instrument and contacted Beckman technical support with the problem. Their suggestion was to replace the aperture clip in the detector with a 100 x 800 micron size aperture (over the capillary window) instead of the 100 x 200 micron size that they were using.

They did that (and also replaced the capillary) and it made a world of difference in the light throughput and reduction of noise. The baseline threshold was 75, well below the 400 they were experiencing and the integration parameters for the method were working much better after the change using the CElixirOA5.4 buffer kit.