Determination of soil pH using a laboratory robot

A commercial laboratory robot has been programmed to prepare up to 144 soil samples for pH determination. The soils are manually scooped into tubes (as part of our receiving service), and loaded into racks capable of holding 40 tubes each. The robot determines the weight of soil in each tube (if required), picks up a pipette and adds water, vortex mixes, centrifuges, and finally picks up a pH probe and determines the pH of the supernatant. All weight and pH data are collected by the robot, and stored on a diskette ready for transfer to a LIMS. Fifteen (15) soil samples per hour can be processed in this way.