Sample preparation plays a pivotal role in elemental analysis as it directly impacts the data quality, the laboratory throughput and the analysis costs. Over the last 30 years, this technology went through a series of incremental innovations that further evolved technology and intercepted the needs of several industries. Nowadays, elemental analysis is moving toward lower detection limits, which highlights the fundamental need that sample preparation has to be more efficient and reliable.
In this book, we will discuss the incremental and disruptive innovation of the microwave digestion system, starting from the first implementations of the rotor-based systems until the latest Single Reaction Chamber (SRC) technology. In order to keep up with the current spectroscopy instrumentations, and the needs of modern laboratories, microwave sample preparation has to provide an enhanced performance, a superior ease of use, lower costs per sample and a higher throughput. The SRC technology embraces all these needs in a single solution setting a new path in sample preparation. Laboratories now rely on a new approach to increase productivity and competitiveness without sacrificing the capabilities of the digestion and the quality of the analysis.
The aim of the authors is to explain the reasons behind the development of the SRC technology, its operation principle, and the values that it brings to modern laboratories, through a series of case studies and the new opportunities it ensures in elemental analysis.