Many laboratories within the chemical industry in the meantime have adopted the use of automated High-Output-Technologies, which has been boosting productivity in the pharmaceutical industry since several decades.
New research fields like “Biofuels & Renewable Energy Sources” recently started to automate their workflows to keep-up with an ever-increasing amount of samples.
For this reason instruments similar to the equipment, which originally have been designed to accelerate the process of Drug Discovery, now commonly are being used for parallel Sample Preparation, Pre-treatment, Digestion and Analysis.
Multiple dispensing of solid and liquid samples, sample treatment with corrosive chemicals under harsh conditions, unit operations like liquid/liquid extraction, filtration, SPE purification, solvent evaporation and quantitative determination of yields are only some of the most relevant workflow steps for this community.
Other technical requirements to these instruments might strongly differ from workflow to workflow. Generally a diverse set of complex unit operations needs to be automated, which are characteristic to each individual workflow.
For this reason only flexible, highly modular, and scalable equipment has the chance of covering the complex automation needs of this emerging field.
Using selected examples from the “Biofuels & Renewable Energy” R&D this presentation will show how a variety of challenging, parallel workflows fully has been automated.