How Helping My Father Repair and Build Spectrometers Led to ICP Advancements and Development of the Burgener Nebulizer
John Burgener
My father, John E. Burgener, was a pioneer in making spectrometers become daily analytical instruments. His work at the Aluminum Company of Canada probably doubled or tripled the amount of Aluminum produced during WWII by enabling near instant analysis and continuous processing of the Aluminum. When the war ended, he started his own company with a home built 3 meter spectrometer, and eventually expanded his lab into one of Canada’s most advanced analytical labs – Technical Service Laboratories (TSL).
As a child, I was asked to help him do upgrades, electrical wiring and other things that he knew how to do but had poor eyesight and could not do himself. By the time I was 15 years old, I was building spectrometers including the mechanical, optical and electronic components. This experience led me to getting a summer job in the Arctic with the University of Toronto Biology department as their repair person, which led to me getting other northern jobs for other summer positions, including geophysical and geochemical exploration, running a mobile lab, and a one short job installing and operating magnetometers on a submarine looking for transatlantic phone cables. After university, I worked as a geologist on the northern coast of Canada, followed by setting up and running a mobile AA lab in Yellowknife, NWT, and then went traveling around the world for a year.
When I returned, my father had some minor problems at TSL he wanted help with. The minor problems included setting up mobile labs in Canada and the US, and working on the new ICP.
It was the first or second ICP that Jarrell Ash had produced, based on an Arc-Spark instrument with an ICP source instead of an Arc source. TSL was a test lab for Jarrell Ash, and my father received his ICP before they were commercially available to anyone else. In theory, it should have been able to run samples and get excellent results with only synthetic standards used, and no interferences of concern. However, the lab manger was not getting useful results at all, and the synthetic standards and lack of interference corrections was apparently a large part of the problem. In 1977, I began the task of getting the revolutionary new ICP spectrometer up and running for our most difficult sample analysis: Whole Rock analysis. Whole Rock analysis could be done by wet chemistry, but it took a person a day to do 5 to 10 samples. In theory, we could do 200 in a day on the ICP. Three years later, we had a system operating and providing good results on 200 samples a day.
With the ICP operating, I was sent to Kenya for two and a half years to setup and run a lab there for a mining company. On return to Canada, a major focus was improving the ICP. The original computer was a DEC PDP-8 and difficult to use. We bought a DEC PDP-11, interfaced it to the PDP-8 and got the raw data from the PDP-8 to the PDP-11 and was then able to process the results 100 times faster. Guy Legere and Manny Phull joined the team and began work on replacing the DEC computers with the new IBM PC style computers. They built new electronic interfaces so that the PC could operate the ICP, and I wrote the software to run it. To improve the interference corrections, we added a spectrum shifter, wrote software to handle the interference corrections (SPIF), and put the MIT wavelength database into a computer program (Lambda III) to identify the interferences. Eventually we tied the sample prep into the computers and had a full LIMS system up and running by 1988.
Whole Rock lithium metaborate digestions were problematic for nebulizers. Most plugged up in a few hours. We bought every one available at the time but they did not work. Guy was inspired to use Teflon to make his own nebulizer and tried to make a pillar and post Babington Teflon nebulizer. It did not plug, but it also did not work well. I suggested that we use a block of Teflon with a hole at the top that let the sample flow down a groove past the gas orifice so it was entirely one piece, with nothing to adjust. This became the Burgener-Legere Nebulizer (probably the first V groove design), which enabled us to run the ICP for weeks at a time, and run 800 samples a day with the results adding to 100% +/- 1.5% for the total of all elements in the sample.
TSL was sold in 1990 to an investment group who had no understanding of technical companies. TSL was bankrupt 18 months later and I was suddenly out of a job. I decided to start my own company. I pursued ten different things (reusable rockets, cloning, computer design, programming, LIMS systems, …), one of which I hoped would lead to a stable career and decent income. None of those ideas panned out, but people kept asking if I could make a Burgener-Legere Nebulizer for them. It took about a week to make one, and I sold them for $500. Not very profitable. A customer in Nevada received one that only worked for a few weeks. I sent a second, then a third and then gave up, and decided to never make another nebulizer. A year later they phoned and begged me to try again, as they had tried all other nebulizers and none worked on their HF solutions. I had decided that the Burgener-Legere design did not work and I needed to do something else. I spent weeks experimenting with different designs, and eventually came up with the Parallel Path Method. A Parallel Path Nebulizer took a day to make instead of a week, and was more reliable and longer lasting. In 1995, I incorporated Burgener Research to make nebulizers. By 2002 I had come up with a better design: the Enhanced Parallel Path Nebulizer. It is the method used in all of our present nebulizers.
Nebulizers require good spray chambers, and we have spent a lot of time working on different designs of spray chambers, aiming for 100% of the sample being delivered to the torch. Originally, we tried different physical shapes and sizes, but that did not get all of the sample vaporized. Recently with Diane Beauchemin of Queen’s University, we have been using IR heated chambers and are finally succeeding in 100% transport.
This presentation will include discussions on the history of nebulizers, spray chambers, and how my unusual background relates to it all.
Heritage Lecture, Winter Conference on Plasma Chemistry Tucson, Arizona January 15-20, 2024