Problems with Time Delay on FacsAria

Hi flowers:

I have recently had some confusing problems with Time Delay, there are 2 lasers(blue and red) on our Aria, it happened after a service while the red laser has bees adjusted for getting more narrow peaks. 

The Time Delay was ok for a while, then it began to behave badly,  like today, I was calibrate for QC, the Time Delay was set on -38.45, the compensations were performed successfully afterwords, and I ran some stained blood/lymphocytes to check the compensations, it was ok, then I continued to run some samples, then suddenly there were no signals. 

After a while with shutting down, cleaning in suspicion of clogging in	the system, I checked with the rainbow 8 peaks beads, the Time Delay has decreased to - 40,45. 

This has happened couple of times before, I got really confused. Every flowccytometrist knows that it takes hours for preparing calibration and compensation, with this kind of problems of mine, one could sit for working in hours.  I wonder if some experts could explain the problems.

Not only so, I found out that theTime Delay and area scaling of red laser are associated with each other. My experiences is that it's not easy to get a strong signal of APC-H and APC-A, the mean values changes all the time if I adjust the Time Delay by a given area scaling. If I change the area scaling value, then the Time Delay changes too,  the changes are about ±1. 

So my second question is how I can get a proper Time Delay and a area scaling of Red laser.


Sincerely yours

Yan Zhang 

Senior engineer
Flow-lab
Epi-Gen Inst.
Akershus univercityhospital
Norway
Tel. 67984432/67984622
Mobil. 48053728