BIOMASS GRINDING AND DISPENSING SYSTEM
INRA high throughput system for wood tissue analysis.
System Overview.
In 2013 Labman installed two high throughput wood grinding and dispensing systems that could process a variety of wood tissues for NIRS, genetic and chemical analysis.
Using our versatile XYZ robot design we created a custom robot which can pick and place vials, attach caps and grind wood samples in 60ml vials. After manually filling the vials with wood samples the robot picks the 1st vial and grinds the samples using ball bearings. The operator can program the system to adjust the particle size by varying the grind duration. After grinding the powder is dispensed into either NIRS vials for offline near infrared spectroscopy or storage vials for sample archiving or downstream chemical or genetic analysis. Powder is dispensed gravimetrically +-0.01g with the weight confirmed in a database stored using the vial barcode.
The system is used every day as part of a French national project to further the understanding of native species.
Key Features.
High Throughput Process
Up to 96 Input Vials, 3 replicates per 20 hours
Ball Mill Grinding
Automatic Grinding by Ball Mill
Configurable
Configurable particle sizes
Capping and Decapping
Automatic Capping and De-Capping
NIRS Vial Filling
Filling of NIRS vials
Storage Vial Filling
Filling of storage vials for downstream chemical analysis
Powder Dispenser
Powder Dispense up to 4g
Precision
Powder Precision +/- 0.001g
Barcode reading
Barcode reader for easy tracking of samples
