gaschromatography for Chemical.Warfare.Agents

[SIMONE]

Hi to everyone.

My boss wants me to develop a GC to detect Chemical Warfare Agents (potential market is huge, unfortunally)

As I don't want to die, I'm looking for compounds having the same GC behaviour of C.W.A, in order to test my system.

Labs authorized to make tests with real chemical weapons asked me a crazy amount of money !

[pochengjean]

just curious, what chemicals usually presents in the C.W.A...2,4,6-trinitrotoulene? or something like that? or something like nerve gas?

[SIMONE]

Chemical Warfare Agents are not explosives, but nerve gases like Sarin (VX), Soman, Tabun, and blister agents like Yprite (Mustard gas)... pretty things, aren't they ?

[CE Instruments]

I sold a GC about 12 years ago to a company that made filters to go in gas masks and they tested with nerve agents. We sold them a GC with the electronics attached by 5m cables and the GC and GSV were mounted in an isolation fume hood to protect the user. Nowadays you should be able to put the whole GC in isolation and use full PC control. The GC side is simple, we supplied TCD and FID at the time but you might need to consider DID (Discharge Ionisation detector) very sensitive universal gas detector for low levels. The GC is the easy bit, sample handling an licence issues must be the problem