Industrial Laboratory

At Joint Meeting of Essex and Union Counties we use our Industrial Laboratory to examine the wastewater from our Industrial Discharges. Some of the parameters we test for are pH, Total Suspended Solids, Oil and Grease, PHC, Metals, Cyanide, Ammonia, Chlorides, Sulfates, and BOD. These results are then reported to our pretreatment officers who help our Industrial Discharges set up a pretreatment system to stay within compliance levels.

It is important that these results get processed as quickly and as accurately as possible. That is why we added the Varian Hot Block and the Horizon technology Speed-Vap III, which is coupled with the Solvent Trap, to our equipment list.

The Hot Block is an acid digestion system that reduced the time it takes for us to process Industrial samples for metals analysis. It reduces the time it takes to digest the samples as well as the time it takes to process the samples after digestion. With this new system, samples are digested and filtered in the same 50mL polypropylene tube, reducing time spent on sample processing and glassware cleaning.

The Horizon Technology Speed-Vap III with the Solvent Trap is a solvent evaporation and recovery system that reduces the time it takes to evaporate off samples for Oil and Greases. After extracting the samples with the Spe-Dex 3000XL Extractor, we transfer the hexane to a metal pan that is placed into the Speed-Vap III. The pans are then uniformly heated and a vacuum is used to create a gentle flow of air over the samples. This lessens the time it takes to evaporate off the hexane, it reduces the cooling time, and removes the use of glass boiling flasks that need to be cleaned, acid rinsed and dried. Plus, as an added bonus, the Solvent Trap lessens the amount of hexane released into the atmosphere.