Since the start of 14C routine measurements at the Erlangen AMS-facility in 1995 the number of measured samples per year has been continuously raised to more than 1000 samples in 2004. The spectrum of samples that can be prepared in our laboratory has been extended to pre-industrial iron artefacts, and will be extended to mortar in the near future. In 2001 a hybrid ion source for the measurement of gaseous and solid targets has been installed. Since then the main focus of our work has been the development of an EA-coupled gas handling system for automated online radiocarbon measurements. Our goal is the maximal exploitation of the sample material to enable the measurement of samples down to only a few µg for e.g. biomedical or environmental research. Two other presentations of our group will focus on these items [1, 2]. Tank sparks of our EN Tandem which could severely interfere with online measurements have been reduced to a minimum of about one spark in four days of continuous measuring. The background of unprocessed samples has been reduced to more than 65,000 BP, and progress in understanding the background of processed samples, which is around 45,000 BP, has been made. The automation of the whole facility has been advanced, all power supplies and step motors are controlled by a programmable logic controller (PLC), and the data acquisition system is now operated by Lab ViewTM. Lab ViewTM is also used for a half automated reduction in the newly combined sample trapping and reduction facility, and will be used for the development of fully automated online AMS measurements and automated sample combustion and oxidation.
[1] W. Kretschmer et al., contribution to this conference. [2] T. Uhl et al., contribution to this conference.
See more of Poster Session I
See more of The 10th International Conference on Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (September 5-10, 2005)