Comprehensive Two-Dimensional Gas Chromatography Hyphenated with a Vacuum Ultraviolet Spectrometer To Analyze Diesel—A Three-Dimensional Separation (GC × GC × VUV) Approach

Abstract

Effective separation of individual components continues to pose the greatest challenge in the characterization of complex hydrocarbon mixtures. Recent research has tackled this problem using several different multidimensional separation techniques such as coupling gas chromatography to a vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) spectrometer. Total absorption signals from the VUV spectrometer allow for general-purpose detection that is well suited for quantitative analysis. Full-range VUV spectra also can be collected that provide additional chemical information with absorption bands correlating to specific structural groups. When hyphenated with an advanced gas chromatography separation technique such as GC × GC, the full-range VUV spectrum can be used as a third dimension of separation. In this study, the three-dimensional technique, namely, comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography hyphenated with a vacuum ultraviolet spectrometer (GC × GC × VUV), is demonstrated using a diesel sample. The separation of various compounds that chromatographically coelute and the resolution of isomers that cannot be separated by mass spectrometry or any other analytical technique illustrate the power of this new analytical capability.

Advanced data preprocessing for comprehensive two‐dimensional gas chromatography with vacuum ultraviolet spectroscopy detection

“…Vacuum ultraviolet detector (VUV) has been recently successfully hyphenated with GC × GC analysis [3–7]. This hyphenation has a lot of potential for the exploration of complex samples, particularly in the field of fuel analysis.…”

30th Anniversary of comprehensive two‐dimensional gas chromatography: Latest advances

“…Due to their chemical complexity, often a single technique is not capable of providing a complete separation or reliable identification and quantitation of petroleum and refined petroleum products. Wang reported an application of GC×GC on the complementarity of vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) and field‐ionization MS (FIMS) detection on diesel qualitative and quantitative analysis 44 . VUV detection indeed may help in distinguishing coeluting components in a comprehensive two‐dimensional gas chromatographic separation that are not resolved by molecular weight or ion fragmentation.…”

Quantification of Hydrocarbons in Gas Oils by GC×GC-VUV: Comparison with Other Techniques

“…The first report regarding VUV detector coupling with GC×GC was published in 2016, and since then, application of GC×GC-VUV has been dedicated to gasoline, middle distillate, and/or crude oil analysis, − polar VOCs in breath gas, biodiesel fuel, and fatty acid samples . These works have demonstrated the preservation of good peak shape and resolution of the GC×GC analysis with various benefits in terms of discrimination of compound classes through spectral filtering, the use of spectral decomposition for coeluted species, and also the possibility of pseudo-absolute calibration.…”