UV-visible spectrophotometry: technical operation and quality control

Analysts using UV-Vis for quantitative work, and quality staff who write the instrument-check procedures.

Suits both dedicated spectrophotometer users and staff using UV detection as part of another technique.

The syllabus below is the standard shape of the course. It is adjusted to the matrices, methods and instruments you actually run, which is agreed before delivery rather than discovered on the day.

• Principle

  Beer’s law, its assumptions, and the concentration at which each one fails

• Performance checks

  Wavelength accuracy, photometric accuracy, linearity, stray light, noise and baseline flatness

• Reference materials

  Holmium, potassium dichromate and the certified filters used for each check

• Blanks

  Choosing the blank that corrects for what actually needs correcting

• Calibration curves

  Range, weighting, forcing through zero, and honest treatment of outliers

• Cuvettes

  Material, matching, path length, handling and cleaning

Courses are written around what a delegate can do afterwards, not what was presented to them. These are the outcomes this one is built to produce.

1. 01Run a full performance check set and judge each result against a criterion.
2. 02Recognise where a sample has left the linear range instead of extrapolating into it.
3. 03Choose a blank that corrects for the interference actually present.
4. 04Build a calibration curve that is defensible, including how outliers were handled.

UV-Vis is simple to operate, which is why it is so often operated without checks. Wavelength drift and stray light both produce smooth, believable, wrong numbers.

Beer’s law failing at high absorbance is the other routine one — a sample read at 2.5 absorbance units is being quantified in a region where the relationship the method depends on has stopped being linear.

Delivered over 1 day, at your site or at the laboratory, in English or Arabic. Sessions are built around real records, real data and real failures rather than slides of clause numbers, and the people delivering them spend the rest of the week doing the thing being taught.

Group size is agreed in advance — practical sessions are capped so that everyone works rather than watches. An attendance certificate is issued to each delegate on completion.

Ask about any subject not listed here. If it is not something we teach well, we will say so rather than build it for the sake of the booking.