Tekmar Talk Blog

A carefully designed and faithfully executed preventative maintenance program is the best method for maintaining your scientific instruments. Keeping up with daily, weekly, monthly, and even quarterly maintenance tasks will help maintain the performance of the unit and decrease downtime. Maintenance checklists can be found in the manual to your Teledyne Tekmar instrument. The manual can also be an immense help with troubleshooting, because it has tips and instrument flow diagrams.

Water vapor entering the gas chromatograph (GC) inlet, column, and, ultimately, the mass spectrometer (MS) can minimize the sensitivity of our early eluting compounds, including our gases. It can also cause poor peak shape, compounds to co-elude, and shift in retention time, even in compounds outside of the water peak. So, once the water is introduced into our system, it starts to wreak havoc on all our compounds. Some say water doesn’t affect column phase or lifespan, but some have seen an effect, especially if you’re running a lot of samples; water can shorten the column life of your GC column and can cause vacuum issues if you’re using a MS system, which could lead to shorter filament lifetime and having to clean the source more often.

Throughout this blog series, we’ve discussed ways to minimize the amount of water vapor introduced to the GC-MS, using Teledyne Tekmar’s moisture control fitting and application control. We can continue to control moisture not only through this hardware designed for the Purge and Trap, but also through method parameters we can adjust and using smart method parameters on the GC.

The last two Purge and Trap (P&T) settings we will discuss in this blog series might be the most important for moisture control in this volatile organic compound (VOC) analysis: desorb and bake settings.

We can adjust our desorb time to help reduce the amount of moisture we put onto the gas chromatograph (GC) and mass spectrometer (MS). A longer desorb time will remove more of compounds from the analytical trap and send them to the GC, but this includes water, leading to a longer water peak in the total ion chromatogram. If the desorb time is shortened, less of that analyte material is transferred to the GC, but we will have a much shorter water peak, giving the compound peaks better shape and resolution. This gives us an opportunity for method optimization with the desorb settings both in time and temperature.

In part one of this series, we learned why water vapor is bad for volatile organic compound (VOC) analysis. In part two, we will explore ways we can optimize moisture control in the Purge and Trap (P&T) system.

Analyzing volatile organic compounds (VOCs) is an essential part of environmental monitoring, flavor and fragrance analysis, and analysis in the pharmaceutical and petrochemical industries. Gas Chromatograph (GC) columns and detectors, namely Mass Spectrometers (MS), do not perform well in the presence of water. Before the sample is introduced to the GC, it must become a vapor.

For this reason, there are many samples, such as