Grant: Idea to Innovation

Gas chromatography (GC) is used in industry and academic research to identify each component and its amount in a sample containing possibly hundreds of compounds. The power of GC is that this information is obtained in a single application and therefore plays a major role in pharmaceutical quality assurance/quality control, environmental regulatory enforcement and compliance, food safety analysis, forensics, homeland security, and hydrocarbon processing industries. The project will focus on making GC analyses faster and, at the same time, provide the ability to report the concentration of compounds that are present over a very wide range. Current technology is incapable of achieving this. Our technology will enable new approaches to the practice of chromatography in the typical analytical laboratory and will have major impact in two areas. The first is for process GC used as online analyzers. The enhanced capacity and fast analysis will allow a process stream to be monitored using a simple direct injection procedure to ensure that the process is in control in a timely manner. The second is for a portable handheld GC. Our new GC column technology, which will be refined under this proposal, includes a novel heating device to maintain components in the gas phase for separation. This reduces the size of the GC so that it can be easily handled in the field for environmental studies and where homeland security issues require rapid analysis to protect the health of citizens.