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Industrial Liaison Group:
Tel: +44 (0) 1235 778797
E-mail: [email protected]
For more than 10 years, sample changing robots have been an essential tool for macromolecular crystallographers (MX) at synchrotron beamlines, allowing researchers to study 100's of samples per day. With the arrival of fast, pixel array detectors on all the MX beamlines at Diamond, the data collection times have reduced considerably and the number of samples being studied per eight hour shift has more than doubled in the past five years. Consequently there has been a drive to increase the capacity and efficiency of the sample changers.
A new robotic sample changer was first tested by users in early 2015 and we are thrilled to announce that it is now operational on all MX beamlines at Diamond. The new robot, BART, has improved exchange times, increased sample capacity significantly and is more tightly integrated into the beamline control systems which means reliability has also improved.
Once the samples have been loaded into the robot, the user interface to load and unload samples in the data acquisition software is unchanged so there has been a smooth transition for the users from the previous sample changer to BART.
The larger sample capacity means that all samples can be loaded into the robot dewar at the start of the beamline session and the experiments do not need to be interrupted later in the day to change sample containers in the dewar.
The advantages include:
BART is being constantly optimised and the sample exchange time is currently less than 20 s. This is on average a 20 s improvement over the previous sample changers used at MX beamlines. In practise it means that one can collect 15 to 25 samples per hour in a standard user mode and almost twice as many samples if automated data collection mode is applied. The BART robot system was developed by the I03 beamline team with help from Diamond Controls engineers, Mechanical and Electrical engineers, the Data Acquisition team and the MX technicians.
| The BART robot system comprises: |
| A 40 litre liquid nitrogen dewar with reservoir. The dewar has been designed to minimise turbulence and icing during refills, both of which can be damaging to samples. |
| An interchangeable base-plate inside the dewar that can hold either 12 crystallisation plates for in situ data collections (I03 only) or up to 37 unipucks (592 samples) for standard experiments with cryo-cooled samples. |
| A Mitsubishi 6-axis industrial robot arm with controller. |
| A fast dryer for de-icing the robot gripper. Dry times are typically 25 s compared to 90 s for the previous robot. |
| A Diamond PLC controller and EPICS controls system. |
| A machine vision system with two cameras for detecting the location of the dewar lids and reading sample barcodes as they are transferred to the goniometer. |
If you would like to find out more about BART and its industrial applications, please contact the Diamond Industrial Liaison Group on +44 (0)1235 778797, [email protected] or you can follow us on Twitter@DiamondILO or LinkedIn.
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Industrial Liaison Office
