Comparative study of solvent extraction and thermal desorption methods for determining a wide range of volatile organic compounds in ambient air

Analysis of Volatile Organic Compounds in the Ambient Air of a Paper Mill- A Case Study

“…And cantilever enhanced photoacoustic spectroscopy (CEPAS) is a novel and promising technique in the analysis of VOCs (Hirschmann et al 2013). As it is suitable for analysis of a complex mixture of compounds, the most commonly used method to detect VOCs in the ambient air is gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), where the sampling and preconcentration are always done in the first two steps because of the low concentration, and the solvent desorption is followed by the extraction of water-insoluble volatile fractions in the ambient gas (Ramirez et al 2010;Lorenzo et al 2014).…”

Modification of hydrophobic sorbents by cobalt chloride in order to concentrate low molecular polar organic substances from the air for subsequent gas chromatographic determination

“…This is done by passing the analyzed air sample through a tube filled with sorbent. The absorbed VOCs are then desorbed by heating into a flow of carrier gas and transported to a gas chromatograph [13,14].…”

Exhaled Breath Analysis of Smokers Using CMV-GC/MS

“…In their study, of 90 industrial and urban environment VOCs, 18 out of 90 of the VOCs were found using SD extraction by carbon disulfide solvent desorption of charcoal tubes, while 50 out of 90 of the VOCs were found using TD extraction of Tenax® sorbent tubes [11]. The repeatability, recovery, detection, and quantification merit characteristics of TD were generally better than SD.…”

“…Pre-concentration has been achieved through sorbent and fiber technology where VOCs were trapped within sorbents or absorbed to coated fibers. Activated charcoal, graphitized carbon, carbon molecular sieves, metal oxides and porous organic polymers have also been used for pre-concentration [11]. Not all of these pre-concentration technologies can be advantageous in the use of breath sampling as temperature limitations or high artefact levels may interfere with trace analysis [12].…”

“…Solvent desorption is compatible with high molecular mass and thermally unstable compounds and allows the preconcentration of high volumes of air [11]. The adoption of increased sample volume is a consequence of the decreased method sensitivity caused by sample dilution [11,45,46]. Evaporative loss of the sample is observed during the solvent reduction stage [46] and it is reported that only 1-5% of the sample is actually introduced into the GC system [47].…”