PICOGC OR THE REVOLUTION IN GAS-CHROMATOGRAPHIC ANALYSES FOR NATURAL GAS APPLICATIONS

摘要

In many industrial processes (petrochemical and mining industries, chemical processing, natural gas transmission applications, environmental monitoring, fuel cell research and production), fast and reliable detection of gas phase chemicals is mandatory. For instance, high-penetration-rate drilling technologies in mug-logging applications need extremely fast and accurate measurements to identify and quantify the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) directly from the mud-tank headspace gas in real time. Gas chromatography (GC) is one of the most efficient analytical techniques for separation and identification of complex volatile mixtures. Despite its well-known use in many applications, conventional GC systems cannot compete with other fast and economic technologies for in-field analyses in which sensitivity, low gas/energy consumption, linearity and short response times are mandatory. These parameters are extremely important for natural gas industry applications, and many efforts have been made in the last decades to miniaturize the GC technology system incorporating all these features in a single reliable and robust system. To date, only a few micro GC systems are successfully available in the market, however they have a very high cost and do not fulfil all market requirements, making these systems less attractive for final users with respect to other more economic but less accurate optical/chemical sensors. The aim of this work is to develop a complete highly technological lab-on-a-chip (LOC) system for GC analyses fully based on Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) specifically dedicated for the natural gas industry. Initially, the analysis are focused on the determination of the natural gas heating value with two analytical modules working in parallel. To the author's knowledge, this is the very first time the whole analytical core of a GC instrument is entirely assembled with MEMS components with the promising analytical performance and cost advantages obtained.