All things being equal with respect to hardware, column, sample etc., would GC data collected via Open Lab, Chemstation and Mass Hunter all yield the same peak areas?

Question

We are actually running a new 7890B FID on Empower 3 and are getting really low area counts as compared to the I/OQ areas collected by an Agilent field service rep. using a laptop with Mass Hunter.

Waters says that despite their having had a problem with a previous version of the ICF in play here, the problem did not extend to Mass Hunter. Only Chemstation and Open Lab had the issue. I am inclined to call "BS" on this as we are still seeing very low area counts for what should be the same injections made using the same everything (except for data system). Our I/OQ docs show nearly 3 million area counts for the C15 and C16 peaks in the FID MDL test mix via Mass Hunter and we're getting just over 300 area counts in Empower 3. I know that this is not inherently a bad thing as Empower also allows for 5 decimal places but we're only getting about half the S/N in Empower as was reported in the I/OQ doc.

Any suggestions appreciated...

Thanks in advance,

DR

ryoboyle · Accepted Answer

I cannot say for certain about the pA units on the I/OQ report. Agilent OQ reports are generated in the Agilent Compliance Engine and I am not familiar with that software. Generally speaking, when comparing data acquired/analyzed in multiple different software products you want to compare the calculated amount/concentration results as opposed to the peak integration results. As long as the quantification method is properly calibrated and the peak integration is reproducible then similar results should be calculated by the different software products.

All things being equal with respect to hardware, column, sample etc., would GC data collected via Open Lab, Chemstation and Mass Hunter all yield the same peak areas?

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