GC×GC

摘要

Comprehensive 2-D GC provides high-performance separations in terms of selectivity, sensitivity, speed, and structure. The circumstances surrounding the development of the key concepts in comprehensive 2-D GC are worth telling, for they testify to the powers of observation that have sparked the birth of many a novel technology. On a cold winter morning about 20 years ago, John B. Phillips, then a chemistry professor at Southern Illinois University, was warming up his car when he noticed his rear-window defogger wasn't doing its job. Later that day, he went to the local auto parts store to purchase a defogger repair kit, which contained a bottle of electrically conductive paint (copper in ethyl acetate solvent) and a small brush with which to apply the paint to the problem area to reestablish electrical contact. But when Phillips returned to fix his car's defogger, he noticed something else—the defogger line somewhat resembled a fused-silica column in shape and color. Part of his research at the time involved developing on-column GC sample inlet devices, and he was intrigued that this electrically conductive paint might improve the systems he was using. He took the defogger kit to his laboratory, applied the paint to a section of a GC column, connected the resistive piece to a power supply, and briefly heated it after connecting the head of the column to the headspace of a sample vial containing a volatile organic compound.