Which Type of Glass Vial is Best for your Application?

Glass autosampler vials are often chosen for their inertness, but with so many glass options available, how do you determine which type is best for your application? In this blog, we’ll explore the different types of glass and provide key considerations to help you make the right selection.

Standard Glass Vials

Our most common glass vial is Type 1 borosilicate, also referred to as “neutral” glass for its chemical resistance and heat resistance. Standard glass vials are suitable for most chromatography applications, and we offer Type 1 borosilicate glass vials in every common closure styles. Unless you have specific needs for a specialty glass, most chromatographers are able to use our generic chromatography vials.

Mass Spec Quality Vials

For LC-MS applications with very low concentrations of analyte, we offer Mass Spec Quality (MSQ) glass autosampler vials. These vials are tested by LC-MS for cleanliness to ensure that residue won’t cause interference with the mass spec results. Our most popular MSQ vial is our max recovery vial. These vials are manufactured for compatibility with Waters HPLC autosamplers.

Silanized Vials

Most of our standard vials are also available in a silanized version (tip: just add “-SIL” to the end of the vial part number). Silanization is a vapor-phase treatment of the glass, which masks the polar Si-OH groups on the surface of the glass vials, in effect “derivatizing” the glass. Silanized vials are commonly used to prevent adsorption of highly polar molecules that may otherwise react with the glass.

Reduced Surface Activity Vials

Due to the silicate layer and “glass dust” in ordinary glass, silanizing is often not 100% effective. Reduced Surface Activity (RSA) vials are another option. Rather than a coating/Silanization, the glass is manufactured to have reduced surface activity for basic compounds. For pharmaceutical labs with low dosage pharma or generics, LCMS users, or regulated customers, the RSA vial has been shown to be more effective than silanized vials. The RSA vials limits changes in vials before injection, even hours later, and there are virtually no metals contained in the glass compared to MS Certified glass vials.