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Agilent 8890, GC-ECD, Headspace, Chromatography

Discussions about GC and other "gas phase" separation techniques.

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Hi there. Just a simple lab tech here looking for some opinions on my chromatography. I'm open to providing any necessary information. In the chromatograms, blue represents an air blank, cyan indicates a matrix sample containing some analyte, and purple denotes a mid-level binary calibrator.

The tests were conducted on an Agilent 8890 using a newly conditioned column and a fresh detector, employing headspace analysis with a split ratio of 5:1. The method maintains the oven at 65°C until the two-minute mark, after which it ramps up to 195°C to facilitate a mini bakeout, causing the baseline to rise towards the end.

My primary concern is the 2,3-Butanedione analyte. Its peak, occurring near the end of the solvent peak, leads to a sloped baseline. The unusual hump and dip at 2.05 and 2.1 minutes, along with the tailing of the analyte peak, are concerning at a glance, and I'm unsure of the best integration method. Currently, we achieve an R2 of 0.9993 with a three-point calibration, integrating by drawing the baseline horizontally. While our recoveries and reproducibility are mostly satisfactory for our purposes, we do perform some manual-integration-magic. 2,3-Butanedione serves merely as an indicator of fermentation completion in beer production.

I welcome any advice, comments, or suggestions you may have. Thank you!

PS - I'm not quite sure how best to view these chromatograms. How 'good' my analysis looks seems highly dependent on the scale of the X and Y. I also forgot to add that all PMs are up to date, we recently changed our syringe, split vent filter, o rings, liners, and our leak tests looked great.

My images are broken, maybe this works: https://imgur.com/a/chromatography-ryFozCD

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How fast are you ramping? I'd try holding an extra half a minute or so and see what that looks like.
How fast are you ramping? I'd try holding an extra half a minute or so and see what that looks like.
40C / min. This would be an easy change. I also attempted to increase the split ratio from 5:1 to 10:1, but I didn't see much of a change in regards to noise. It did decrease our lowest calibrator's area count from 160 to 100hz, though.

Our baseline has recently begun doing some weird stuff to the prior to the solvent peak. Doesn't seem to impact the analytes, but it's new and I don't like it lol.

https://imgur.com/a/vH134B9
3 posts Page 1 of 1

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