The in situ LC

PalmChrom weighs 2 kg. In its rugged outdoor case, it weighs 2.7 kg and takes up 4.8 L.

The integrated 25 Wh battery gives 5 hours of continuous use. Through the USB-C port you can connect a power bank or a solar panel, for longer or unlimited autonomy.

Not once the system is configured. You are four clicks away from an analysis: inject the sample, select what you want to measure, and wait 20 minutes for the result. Creating your own methods is a different matter, and requires some chromatography know-how: choosing flow rates, volumes, columns, and mobile phase chemistry.

In the field, with its touchscreen. In the lab, from a connected computer. When it is deployed, through the Iridium satellite connection: you configure and start measurements remotely, and receive the chromatograms and results by email. In every case it runs on PalmSoft.

PalmChrom draws 5 W, while a benchtop HPLC can draw up to 1 kW. It is designed for 2.1 mm columns, which need less mobile phase, and it is built mostly from aluminum, which is fully recyclable. Beyond that, each way of using it saves something different.

Portable, it saves plastic: there are no sampling vessels to buy, pre-clean, and ship to a lab.

Deployed, it saves the plastic and, additionally, the CO₂: one trip to install it and occasional trips to refill reagents, instead of one trip per sample.

Both the sample preparation and the chromatography are controlled by software, step by step. You define the method, and PalmChrom carries it out. You don’t need to be physically at the device to prepare the sample or run the analysis.

Spectrometry can also be used in the field. Techniques such as UV-Vis, NIR, XRF, Raman, and FTIR measure the combined signal of everything in the sample that absorbs or emits radiation. That tells you about a family of compounds, but it cannot single out one specific compound and quantify it. Chromatography separates the compounds first, so you can quantify exactly the one you are targeting, which is where regulation is heading.

Most samples cannot go straight into a chromatograph. Water carries particles, and the compounds you are looking for are often very diluted, or mixed with other substances that get in the way. So the sample has to be cleaned up and concentrated first. In a lab this is usually done by hand, and it is the slowest and most error-prone part of the whole analysis.

PalmChrom does it automatically, inside its own valve. It packs a tiny bed of absorbent beads, pushes the sample through it so that the compounds you want stick to the beads while the rest is washed away, and then releases those compounds into the column. Afterwards, the used beads are flushed out and replaced with fresh ones for the next sample. This is called ‘bead injection’. Because a large volume of sample can pass through a small bed, the compounds end up concentrated, which makes the analysis more sensitive.

The hardware consists of the minimal number of components needed: a pump and a valve. By minimizing components and optimizing the control electronics, I keep power consumption low enough for PalmChrom to run on batteries.

PalmChrom relies on bead injection and sequential injection chromatography principles. This high flexibility allows filtering, extraction, derivatization, addition of internal standards, gradient mixing, and elution to the chromatographic column, all without analyst intervention, just smart algorithms and internal standard corrections working behind the scenes.

The same compounds you would analyze in the lab with HPLC-UV/Vis. PalmChrom works up to 100 bar, mixes a gradient of two mobile phases, and takes the column of your choice, so you decide the chemistry. Detection is by photometry at a preselected wavelength, fluorimetry, or amperometry. You can change the wavelength by replacing the LED light source. A dual-wavelength flow cell with fiber-optic connection is in development, which will let you connect an SMA spectrophotometer and light source of your choice.

Yes. PalmChrom is a powerful platform for sample preparation, standalone or hyphenated to GC, HPLC, and ICP. Even if you don’t need chromatography at all, it performs solid-phase extraction with 4 mg of sorbent in under 13 seconds, more than 285 samples per hour. The numbers are in my paper Sample preparation under turbulent flow with renewable sorbent (Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry, 2021), and my latest work on the topic is Versatile injector for inline renewable solid-phase extraction (Analytica Chimica Acta, 2024).

How PalmChrom fits sample preparation labs →

I am optimizing the prototype, and I expect to have all required certifications by the end of 2026. Contact me for more information, suggestions, customization, or reserving your device.