Q&A with Randy Mcleod, Senior Vice President of New Technology at Pall Corporation about the considerations for supplying water of various levels of purity for laboratories needs.

Paul Nesdore Chief Editor, A2C2: How important is planning for your laboratory water needs?

Randy Mcleod: When people are planning a lab, they need to consider what specific analysis will be conducted and what equipment will be used in that analysis. The lab will then be designed around the workflow, where the instruments will be placed, and in general, what type of environment is needed. Of course, water supply is part of this. Most people rely on ASTM Type1 standard water.

PN: How pure is this?

RM: It’s not a rigorous standard and is readily achievable in the market. This is where some misunderstanding might come into the planning. For example, if someone sets up an ion chromatography station, ASTM Type 1 water isn’t good enough.

PN: What if you have designed the water system, but in the future, new instruments and process are placed in the lab. Can some sort of flexibility be built in?

RM: Of course additional purification technologies can be added, not inexpensively, however. If you set up a lab and they discover that you don’t have the water quality that you would like to maintain, look first at improved pre-treatment as an option which is to deliver to the water polisher, the final unit, and better water. With this logic, the pre-treatment bears the burden and that’s less expensive.

PN: With your company’s products, you have identified four levels ofpurity. Why not three or five?

RM: There are three common types or grades of water. I’ve mentioned ASTM. In addition, there is CLSI for clinical analyzers, ISO grade, and there is also USP, EP (European Pharmacopeia), and JP (Japanese Pharmacopeia), all of which recognize these different classes of water. Essentially, they have the same groupings, which are Types 1, 2, and 3 water in which they put slightly different performance specifications. So our levels are not arbitrary. We based our levels on the standards that are out there and applied globally.

PN: So there is an international consensus?

RM: Yes. I just came back from a couple of weeks in Asia, and I can tell you that China, India, and Japan all recognize these standards because their global customers use them. ASTM, which is a US-based standard, is the most prevalent. I would say, depending on the industry you are in, you are going to use one of the common standards. Following ASTM, there’s not a lot of difference between food and beverage and pharmacopoeia standards.

PN: I hear from the design/build people, that some build to exceed specification. But exceeding specification costs money. Is there a parallel lesson here with laboratory water systems?

RM: Well, let’s look at it this way. The facility will look at water at different levels. They will look at the water they are being fed from the municipality. They will have to treat that water in any event, just to feed that water into their building. After that, the water is probably treated two or three times. When you talk about cleanrooms and labs that would be associated with cleanrooms, there will be most likely a high purity DI (deionized) loop or a large scale RO (reverse osmosis) system to create both production grade water which will incidentally feed lab waters. So there will be taps around the lab that can produce RO quality water which is also Type 3 water.