CA Agilent
|Articles|March 4, 2011

Column

  • The Column-03-04-2011
  • Volume 7
  • Issue 4

GC-MS: The Superior Forensic Tool

In the wake of the recent dioxin poisoning scare in Europe that sparked import bans on some German farm products, GC-MS is emerging as the perfect analytical tool for forensic analysis.

In the wake of the recent dioxin poisoning scare in Europe that sparked import bans on some German farm products, gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) is emerging as the perfect analytical tool for forensic analysis. In fact, its simplicity, sensitivity and effectiveness in separating and identifying components, has made GC–MS one of the most important tools in analytical chemistry today.

Where other analytical techniques fundamentally determine the quantitative issues arising from analysis of a specific sample - answering the question “how much is present?” - GC–MS is one of a very few techniques able to qualitatively identify the actual nature of chemicals in the sample. It answers the question “What molecules are present?”

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Figure 2. Split injection used to measure triplicate test of MTBE, hexane, o-xylene, and 1-methylnaphthalene comparing different solvents (methanol, methylene chloride) and column insertion distances starting with 0.5 mm, 5.0 mm, 10.0 mm, 15 mm, and 20.0 mm. Methanol had the best performance at the 5.0 mm insertion distance and methylene chloride looked slightly better at the 0.5 mm. We would still recommend not going below the 5.0 mm manufacturer recommended insertion distance.
Revisiting insertion distance for methanol and methylene chloride in GC analysis and confirming that insertion depth strongly affects response and reproducibility.