Getting started

Blood cell counter racks are placed onto the Start Yard by hand or fed in through the input conveyer belt of the Start Yard. The racks are trimmed and subsequently pushed automatically to the front end where it lines up with the rack conveyor-belt.

Manually pushing racks against or away from the front end will interfere with the ejector mechanism causing errors. Racks will wait until the sampler unit sends a rack request. On that rack request, one rack is pushed towards the indexer and subsequently grabbed by it to be processed.

The <Instruments> controls all the belt movements, rack transports and also the host communication between ESR analyser unit and Lab communication system.

The Indexer is a carriage that grabs and holds the rack from the conveyor belt and performs a check for the presence of sample tubes and reads the barcode. The indexer acts independently.
In case the barcode can not be read right away, a tube rotator will rotate the sample tubes in the rack both clock-wise and anti-clockwise until the barcode reader reads the barcode.
The Interrliner will send an inquiry and wait for the host to receive a YES or NO status for sampling.
In case the barcode is not readable the Interrliner will set the status for this tube to N (NO) and this tube will not be processed!
Tubes with the status NO will not be processed by the analyzer.

After reading the barcodes the sample rack moves towards the robotic arm, the arm moves forward and picks up at least one tube (if present: three tubes).
The tube(s) are turned up side down up nine times. The robot places the tube(s) back in the rack, the rack moves one position and the robotic arm picks up the next tubes.
The first tube is then placed in the sample tube adapter of the ESR analyser.

The analyser starts the aspirating procedure and in the meantime the robotic arm starts mixing the remaining tubes.

When the aspirating cycle is finished, the tubes are placed back into the rack and the sequence starts all over again.

As soon as the rack has been processed completely, it is moved to the conveyor belts shifting mechanism, released to the conveyor belt and transported to the End-Pool.

ATTENTION:
The quality of the barcode labels is of critical importance for the correct function of the sample robot. Labels may not come loose or have “dog-ears”! Poor label quality cannot be compensated by mechanical adjustments!

At aspiration the blood is accurately diluted with citrate (1:4) subsequently fed into the Westergren pipette. After 60 or 30 minutes (depending on the method settings) the automatic reading of the pipettes is carried out by moving an optical sensor along the pipettes. This reading is then stored in the integrated PC system and reported to the connected LIMS. A direct print out is also possible by connecting a printer.

The pipettes are automatically flushed, cleaned and dried to be ready for a next sample to perform ESR.

When the aspirating cycle is finished, the sample tube is placed back into the rack and the sequence starts all over again.