Total Organic Carbon Analysers

Tender description

The TOC instruments perform low level and high salt level determinations of dissolved organic carbon. They are needed to replace an older high sensitivity TOC analyser that has broken and as a consequence the existing TOC analyser is now heavily used in projects measuring dissolved organic carbon at high levels. The high-salt system will also expand our capability to analyse DOC in seawater samples. Analysis of DOC is key to nearly all of the laboratory-based projects in the SoGS, which are funded by NERC (e.g., Black and Bloom – Tranter, PISCES – Wadham, Domaine and SPECTRA - Johnes), DEFRA (e.g., Johnes) and EU (e.g., MicroArctic – Anesio), currently totalling over £10M in grants. The need of these projects is very different in terms of detection limits and types of samples. While for instance, the DEFRA/NERC funded project to Prof. Johnes is analysing DOC from UK rivers at very high levels, the concentrations analysed by other NERC/EU funded projects conducted on glacial environments (Wadham, Tranter and Anesio) are very low and the risks of cross-contamination with only one machine available are very high.