Peer Reviewed: High-speed gas chromatography

Abstract

Emerging technologies have made high-speed GC practical and useful for an increasing range of applications.C and GC/MS are the most frequently used methods for the speciation and quantification of volatile and semivolatile organic compounds. The total cost for these analyses is enormous. Protracted sample turnaround times, which are common for contract laboratories, cause expensive bottlenecks. Dramatic reductions in analysis time could lead to significant economic advantages for applications involving environmental and chemical process monitoring. This Report considers several emerging technologies that have made high-speed GC (HSGC) practical and useful for a rapidly increasing range of applications Slow road to high speedThe potential for a favorable trade of resolution for speed was recognized soon after the development of the open-tubular separation column by Golay in 1957 (1). In 1962 Desty and co-workers (2) used a gas-tight syringe, which was struck by a mallet, to introduce a 10-ms vapor plug into a 2-m long, 0.07-mm i.d. wall-coated metal capillary column. The result was the separation of all nine heptane isomers in about 5 s. A mirror galvanometer array and photographic paper recorded the chromatograms.Wall-coated open-tubular (capillary) GC columns were slow to win acceptance; high-speed capillary column GC, even slower. In part, this resistance was caused by the extraordinary resolving power of long capillary columns, which focused research attention on the separation of increasingly complex mixtures. As a result, analysis time and selectivity became less frequent topics for research. The number of widely used stationary phases dwindled, and the one-size-fits-all approach to methods development became common Often, the column length and the temperature-programming profile are ad-

Application of Comprehensive Two-Dimensional Gas Chromatography (GC×GC) to the Qualitative Analysis of Essential Oils

“…This increased separation power is a result of the "GC6GC advantage" which includes the following characteristics: increased peak capacity, improved analysis speed and sensitivity, and ordered separations based on chemical class. Future work in this laboratory will feature time-offlight (TOF) MS detection, which is rapidly emerging as the mass spectrometer of choice for high speed chromatographic separations [29]. The addition of an MS identification dimension to the GC6GC separation would tremendously enhance the qualitative power of the analytical method.…”

Fast GC instrumentation and analysis for field applications

“…1 Historically, most emphasis has been placed on the use of short, narrow-bore thin-film capillary columns with very narrow injection mechanisms such as flash evaporation from cryogenically cooled traps. This is because the use of fast temperature programming is a relatively new technique.…”

Fundamental considerations for the application of miniature ion mobility spectrometry to field analytical applications

“…There are two approaches to fast chromatography. The first is to ballistically heat an open tubular GC column, [67][68][69][70][71][72] and the second is to microfabricate a short GC column. [73][74][75][76][77] The response of a fast GC can be on the order of tens of seconds, with peak widths on the order of 0.5 ms.…”