Hydrocarbon isomers, present in crude petroleum, may yield similar gas chromatography (GC) retention times and indistinguishable mass spectral patterns. Hence, conventional GC-mass spectrometry (MS) may not provide sufficient data for identification of hydrocarbon isomers. Real-time proton affinity or gas-phase basicity "bracketing" provides an additional dimension to GC-MS analyses. Our GC-fourier transform (FT)-ion cyclotron resonance (ICR)-MS yielded an average mass measurement error of less than 3 ppm for components of a retail gasoline sample. The combined use of concurrent thermo-chemical measurements with GC-FT-ICR-MS data analysis allowed differentiation of various isomers such as C(8)H(10) species.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.