Using a liquid flow meter to optimize peristaltic pump configuration
The September 2026 issue of International Labmate, featured an article exploring how a high-resolution liquid flow meter from Biotech Fluidics can help laboratories to optimise the performance of peristaltic pumps in analytical instrument setups.
The recording of high-resolution flow rate data enabled us to characterise and compare several configurations of the peristaltic pump.
Pump pulsations affected analytical measurement noise
The studied peristaltic pump was delivering reagents to a chemically regenerated membrane suppressor employed for ion chromatography determination of the seven common inorganic anions. The authors determined how flow pulsation patterns affected analytical measurement noise and found that they correlated significantly.
Pump configurations that showed more pronounced flow pulsations performed worse in the anion analysis setup, showing twice or more measurement noise. This limited the signal-to-noise ratio and thereby the detection limits that could be obtained.
The worst pump configurations could thus be easily avoided by simply recording high-resolution flow rate data without performing the full chromatographic analysis.
Faster optimization with the liquid flow meter
The high-resolution liquid flow meter provided a shortcut to avoid problematic peristaltic pump configurations. Instead of assessing analytical noise from repeated ion chromatography analysis runs during several hours, the flow pulsation patterns could be recorded using pure water within a few minutes per pump configuration.
The measure that best represented how much a particular pump configuration would impact the analytical noise was relative flow pulsation calculated as peak-to-peak variation within two minutes
More information
This work was performed by Dr. Tobias Jonsson and Dr. Neelam Akram at Diduco, together with Anders Grahn at Biotech Fluidics and its full version can be downloaded below or retrieved from Labmate Online.
