A revolutionary graphitisation system: Fully automated, compact and simple

A new graphitisation system, directly coupled to an elemental analyser, has been developed for convenient, fast and efficient sample preparations for radiocarbon measurement by means of accelerator mass spectrometry. We demonstrate an alternative to the cryogenic transport of CO2 into the graphitisation reactors with liquid nitrogen, which is used by others. Instead, the CO2 coming from an EA is absorbed on a single column filled with zeolite. The CO2 can then be easily released by heating the zeolite trap and transferred to the reactor by gas expansion. The system is simple and fully automated for sample combustion and graphitisation. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.