Empowering education and research at KAUST university through state-of-the-art technologies

KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) is one of the world’s leading research universities, featuring state-of-the-art infrastructure and a strong focus on scientific innovation. Within this environment, the Analytical Chemistry Core Lab serves as a central hub, supporting approximately 500 students and 120 professors each year, in addition to external industrial activities (about 30% of the samples analyzed).
This is a high-throughput laboratory, where hundreds of users, often with varying levels of experience, work daily on a wide range of applications, including food, biological, geological, precious metals, and environmental samples.
Consequently, there is a critical need for state-of-the-art metal analysis and sample preparation techniques that combine high analytical performance with safety and ease of use.

In the early years of KAUST around 2009, the number of students accessing the analytical chemistry core laboratory was relatively small, and the ETHOS One microwave digestion system provided the required reliability and performance the lab needed. As the university expanded, both the user base and the volume of analytical requests grew dramatically. With hundreds researchers and students from diverse scientific disciplines needing to perform microwave digestion on a daily basis, safety and ease of use quickly became essential. The laboratory therefore needed instrumentation and solutions that would minimize operator intervention, limit direct acid handling, and streamline method setup, all while preserving high analytical quality. Additionally, the team required solutions that could be easily adopted for educational purposes, even by first-time users, while remaining powerful enough to deliver high-quality digestions for diversify samples and matrices such as food, biological, geological, precious metal, and environmental samples, including those with complex matrices.

To meet these evolving needs, the Analytical Chemistry Core Lab management progressively upgraded its sample preparation and analysis capabilities by integrating several Milestone systems:

• ultraCLAVE and ultraWAVE , offering fully automated and safe digestion workflows, ideal for student use with minimal manipulation.
• duoPUR and traceCLEAN , ensuring high-purity acids and contamination-free vessels for trace and ultra-trace analysis.
• DMA-80 evo Direct Mercury Analyzer , enabling direct mercury determination in just six minutes, without reagents or waste, and with full operator safety.

The Milestone Connect platformalso plays a key role in the laboratory’s daily operations, providing standard operating procedures, printouts, visual materials, and video tutorials that are easy for students to follow. This combination of robust instrumentation and accessible training resources has made Milestone systems the perfect solution for KAUST’s educational purposes.
The KAUST ACL team is also highly satisfied with the support provided by the Milestone application team , whether developing new methods or improving existing ones.

Today, the Analytical Chemistry Core Lab at KAUST operates as a model of efficiency, safety, and versatility. The laboratory is equipped with three ICP-OES, HR-ICP-MS, and three triple-quadrupole ICPMS instruments, which provide trace-element analyses across a wide range of sample types. The integration of Milestone systems has significantly enhanced laboratory operations. Safety has improved, enabling hundreds of students to work confidently and independently. Optimized workflows and intuitive software interfaces have made the learning curve easier than ever. The digestion quality achieved with Milestone instruments remains consistently high across a variety of matrices. The duoPUR and traceCLEAN systems guarantee the purity of reagents and cleanliness of vessels, which is essential for reliable trace-level determinations.
At the same time, the DMA-80 evo has proven to be a perfect tool for mercury analysis, allowing students to simply weigh the sample and start the Hg measurement, without the need for reagents or generating chemical waste.