QUB/2740/25 Contract for the Supply, Delivery, Installation, Commissioning, Calibration and Maintenance of a Thermogravimetric Analysis – Mass Spectrometry (TGA-MS) system

Tender description

Queen’s University of Belfast wishes to procure a Turnkey solution for a high-resolution/precision hyphenated TGA-MS system that can analyse the mass and evolved gas product changes associated with thermal decomposition of organic and inorganic samples in radiocarbon dating research and application.<br /><br />The proposed equipment will be used for cutting-edge research into the development of improved methodologies for the reliable and accurate dating of precious (material-limited) archaeological artefacts from museum collections. In particular, it will focus on the investigation, identification and removal of consolidant contamination sources under different heating regimes whilst run in parallel with an in-house ramped pyrolysis/pyroxidation/combustion (RP/RC) setup for separation/graphitization and dating of CO2 fractions. Critical to these experiments, where setups are run in parallel, is the need for the TGA-MS system to provide live overlapped presentation of the TGA AND MS data (i.e. on one chart) during running that allows the user to make on-the-fly evaluations and adjustments to the running parameters (e.g. gas type/flow) of both systems without the need for manual intervention in relation to data manipulation/presentation (e.g. periodic exporting of data from both the TGA and MS onto a common graph). This is vital because of the need to respond to changes occurring immediately, the limited quantity of the material involved (repeat runs not possible) and the time constraints of running both systems in parallel (i.e. synchronous running, with waiting for completion of TGA-MS run before carrying out RP/RPO run not an option).<br /><br />Upon development of new applications for radiocarbon dating consolidant material, the system will be utilized for both academic and commercial purposes, by students, postgraduate researchers and, in particular, visiting archaeologists/curators/conservators from the heritage sector. For these non-technical end users, training personnel, training time and running time will be limited and, as such, simplicity of operation of the overall system is critical for its usability, in particular, the need for a single software application/program for control, data acquisition and data processing (i.e. peak separation and identification). <br />