Chromatography Forum

I've just started working with GC/MS (PerkinElmer) and nobody in my university doesn't know how to work with it.
For my project I need to find some certain substances in TIC chromotogram (which have been already done). How can I do it?

Are you sure your system is working? Does the software communicate with the instrument? Can you tune the mass spectrometer and is the tune free of water (m/z = 18) , oxygen (m/z = 32) and nitrogen (m/z = 28)? When these are gone, your system is pretty much leak free. Until you can get all of this in line, there's no point in moving forward.

This is a very big undertaking for someone who has little or no experience with GCMS. MS is much more complicated than collecting data from a thermal conductivity detector. To get useful information from us, you will have to be much more specific and detailed about what you are trying to do and how your instrument is responding to your changes.

I'v checked my system and it's working (good news ). But I still don't know how to use all software's options.
Does anybody have some manuals how to work with GC/MS? I hope so...

Did you check with Perkin Elmer? Lots of manuals are now available online for download. That is where I would start. Your local PE rep. could help you there as well.

Will you be injecting liquids or is it some type of headspace analysis. If you are injecting liquids, you want to make sure that you turn off the filament while the solvent peak is coming out and turn it back on after the solvent has eluted from the column. Your filament will last a lot longer if you do that.

For the newbie, I would say start with an easy analysis. Make sure you can detect something like BTEX in water at a 1-10 ppb or so (headspace analysis) before you move on to something more challenging.

Ok, thank you!