Application Note ReView: The Use of Hydrogen Carrier Gas for VOC Analysis
Global instability, alongside a wide range of industrial and ecological issues, has led to various gas shortages in recent years, namely CO2 in 2018. Today, there is a shortage of helium and that is of significant concern to a large number of analytical chemists because Helium is the most commonly used carrier gas in gas chromatography. Commercial laboratory organisations looking to improve ROI of their analysis and/or upgrade old systems and methods have been forced to review using Helium as their carrier gas.
As a result of this, our team of Applications Chemists have been investigating the alternatives to using Helium as the carrier gas. In this instance, Hydrogen.
As well as a reduction in gas costs when switching from helium to hydrogen carrier gas – a high-grade helium cylinder can cost up to £1800 and an equivalent hydrogen cylinder £130 – there is also a driver from an environmental perspective, particularly if generators are used for the hydrogen carrier gas supply.
Therefore, this edition of Application Note ReView takes a look at our work from last year: AS248 – Use of Hydrogen (rather than Helium) as Carrier Gas for Analysis of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) in Water Using the Anatune Robotic VOC Analyser.
As there is a fully validated Anatune solution for Volatile Organic Compounds VOCs in water (as reported in Application Note AS243), in this work we chose to evaluate hydrogen as a carrier gas to potentially improve sample throughput, something which is of importance for environmental contract testing laboratories.
AS248 discusses the process of converting a method to use hydrogen carrier gas. It presents some of the data obtained for determination of VOC in water using Static Headspace Extraction with Gas Chromatography – Mass Spectrometry (HS-GC-MS), which is an established technique for this analysis.
Download AS248 – Use of Hydrogen as Carrier Gas for Analysis of VOCs in Water Using the Anatune Robotic VOC Analyser
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