Highest Digestion Quality

The improvement in laboratory efficiency provided by processing samples at higher temperatures and pressures is easy to understand: at a higher temperature, decomposition takes less time.
However, in many laboratories, this will not be the most significant advantage of using the UltraCLAVE.
Traditional closed-vessel microwave digestion proceeds by monitoring and controlling conditions in a single reference vessel. The assumption is made that these parameters can be duplicated in all other vessels that are processed simultaneously along with the reference vessel. In order for this to be true, the sample type, sample mass, the volume of acid, and the performance of all the other vessels must be identical to that in the reference vessel.
In the UltraCLAVE system no single vessel is selected as the reference. Instead, uniform temperature conditions are achieved by positioning all the individual sample vessels in a pool of microwave absorbing fluid, a microwave “load.” It is the effective temperature of this load that is monitored and controlled throughout the heating process.
By eliminating the traditional control strategy, chemists are no longer constrained to process batches of identical samples using identical sample chemistries. To the extent that all the samples in a batch will be satisfactorily processed under the same temperature conditions, many dissimilar samples and chemistries can be combined in a single run in the UltraCLAVE.
Even certified reference materials can be processed along with unknown sample for method validation. This transformation of a sequential process into a parallel one may prove to be the greatest source of increased efficiency in many laboratories.