PerkinElmer Awarded Patent on Thermal Desorption GC Method

PerkinElmer (Waltham, Massachusetts) announced that the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office has awarded it a patent titled “Methods and Systems for Characterizing a Sorbent Tube,” which describes an approach for helping users avoid manual errors in automated thermal desorption (ATD) gas chromatography (GC). The method currently is being used in the company’s TurboMatrix thermal desorber GC systems and was coinvented by Andrew Tipler of PerkinElmer and Neil Plant of the Health and Safety Laboratory (Buxton, UK). According to Tipler, “In the past, analysts had to be concerned that their results could be affected by the lack of integrity of the packing materials in ATD tubes and traps.” The method reportedly enables automatic checking of packaging integrity. ATD was introduced in 1982 as a technique for isolating volatile compounds from gaseous matrices so they can be introduced as samples into a GC system. It is used in the analysis of soil, water, biofuels, polymers, packaging materials, flavors and fragrances, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and other applications.