Samples for the recently developed cavity ring-down spectroscopy (CRDS) carbon-14 instrument at LLNL were previously prepared manually with a throughput of approximately one per hour. An automated sample preparation system to convert carbonaceous samples into pure CO2 for measurement by CRDS has been developed using a two-zone combustion furnace and cryogenic focusing lines. This allows for increased sample throughput and a more thorough comparison of the CRDS and Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) measurements of duplicates. Here we present our automated sample preparation system and a detailed comparison of standard and biological sample measurements made by both CRDS and AMS. Work performed at the Research Resource for Biomedical AMS, which is operated at LLNL under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-AC52-07NA27344, and is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), Biomedical Technology Research Resources (BTRR) under grant number 8P41GM103483 and R21GM111242.

Automation of 14C-labeled, biological-sample measurements by cavity ring-down spectroscopy and comparison to accelerator mass spectrometry

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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