We bought the Picarro L2130-i with funds from the university as part of a joint application with the Research school of Earth Sciences who got a Picarro L2140-i as their part of the purchase, giving them the capability of analysing oxygen-17 in water. Their machine is planned to spend a good part of its time in the field, while ours is strictly lab-based.
Picarro 2130-i cavity- ring down water isotope analyser
Our 2130 is linked into the same system as our Aerodyne dual QCL instrument, with the analysis of water and CO2 shared between them. While the Aerodyne can analyse both carbon dioxide and water, we found that given our need for the best possible precision on our CO2 analyses, that it was better to keep the QCL instrument dry and analyse the water in the CRDS (cavity- ring down system).
The 2130 has performed very well for us, although isotopic calibration of it is always a bit of a challenge. At the moment it is convenient to use evaporation of water in a flask (see Dewey) but continuous generation of vapour from liquid has also been useful (see IsoLyser). For more discussion of this see the Picarro L1102-i page.
While it is very convenient that the 2130 only draws a few 10s of millilitres of gas per minute, it can be hard to make the system rapidly responsive. A pump-through system is a possible solution for this, where the gas is pumped over an open T very close to the inlet of the laser. On the other hand, the Licor system limits the maximum flow rates that we can feed our machines from!
The 2130 system seems to have a much lower concentration dependence than the 1102 and that is useful for gas exchange work, while the 1102 performs very adequately with the PAL and injected waters.