Biomass grinding and dispensing system

System Overview.

In 2013 Labman installed two high throughput wood grinding and dispensing systems that could process a variety of wood tissues for NIRS, genetic and chemical analysis. Using our versatile XYZ robot design we created a custom robot which can pick and place vials, attach caps and grind wood samples in 60ml vials. After manually filling the vials with wood samples the robot picks the 1st vial and grinds the samples using ball bearings. The operator can program the system to adjust the particle size by varying the grind duration. After grinding the powder is dispensed into either NIRS vials for offline near infrared spectroscopy or storage vials for sample archiving or downstream chemical or genetic analysis. Powder is dispensed gravimetrically ±0.01g with the weight confirmed in a database stored using the vial barcode. The system is used every day as part of a French national project to further the understanding of native species.