Replacing an Agilent GC Inlet Seal

Description

Like many components inside a GC injection port, your inlet seal will become dirty over time. As a result, inlet seals need to be replaced periodically, ideally as part of a scheduled routine maintenance program. In this example, we replace the inlet seal in an Agilent 7890 gas chromatograph. The steps may vary on a different instrument or configuration. 

Additional Resources

• GC Inlet Maintenance Quick Reference Guide
• Dual Vespel Ring Inlet Seals
• Flip Seal Inlet Seals Frequently Asked Questions

Restek Recommended Tools & Parts

• Replacement Inlet Seals

Want to learn more about harbor seals?

Transcript

Hi, everybody. We're here for another Restek tip. In this tip, we are going to be replacing our GC inlet seal. It's a lot like a harbor seal, except smaller and not nearly as cute. When we replace our inlet seal, like any maintenance with our injection port, we want to make sure that we cool that injection port off, so it's safe to touch, and we don't burn ourselves. 

When that's ready to go, the first thing that we'll do is disconnect our column from the inlet and get that out of the way. Our next step will be to remove the nut warmer cup. It's that cup of insulation that helps maintain consistent temperature across the length of our injection port. Once we have that out of the way, we'll now be able to get to the reducing nut. When we remove that reducing nut, it's inside there that we'll find the inlet seal. We'll take the old one out and dispose of it, and we'll put our new one in. We do want to be careful when we're handling that new inlet seal. We don't want to get it dirty or contaminate it in any way.

Once we have that new inlet seal in the reducing nut, we can start to put everything back together. It's also important to note that when we go to re-install our column, we do want to confirm our installation distance, and make sure that the column is inserted the correct depth into the inlet. That's it. That's all that's really required when we do maintenance on our inlet seal. Hopefully this was of help to you, and thanks for joining us for this Restek tip.