When will GC/sinqle quad MSD be obsolete for enviro work?

[tangaloomaflyer]

The industry standard system for most high-throughput environmental labs is a capillary gas chromatograph/single quad MSD such as the Agilent 7890/5975.

As existing markets are demanding smaller and smaller detection limits, and emerging markets require analyses on complex matrices (food for example), high specificity/high sensitivity instruments are becoming more appealing.

Will the GCMS workhorse become obsolete?

[Peter Apps]

When bench top GC-MS hit the market people said that the FID would disappear.

Peter

[Spuzzin]

I'm currently working in an environmental lab with 30+ 5973s/75s and 30+ true dual channel FIDs and have no plans for moving away from the single quads or the FIDs.
We also have a couple of triple quads and a tof but they are for specific low throughput analyses.
When triple quads are as cheap and as rugged as the 5975s then I suppose we way change, until then the single quads aren't going anywhere.

Rich

[gpronger]

I spent a number of years as the technical director for one of the multilab environmental testing companies, and through the '90's we had corporate staff that were certain by the early part of the next decade (7 - 8 years ago at this point) all the organic instrumentation would be replaced by immunoassay techniques.

We are driven by regulatory requirements, and until the existing methods (524.2, 525, 624, 625, 8260, 8270) require lower limits, then the bench-top quads will have have a purpose in the typical environmental testing laboratory. We are currently utilizing predominately Agilent (HP) 5971's 5972's 5973's and two Thermo DSQ-II's and these systems are not likely to be replaced since they are more than capable of achieving the levels of sensitivity that are regulatorily required.

Now, we have potentially on the horizon emerging markets which may require us (as an industry) to bring online HPLC-MS (likely triple quad configurations) techniques and GC-TOF, or high res MS, or MS triple quad.


These techniques won't likely replace existing systems (if for no other reason cost) but will be needed for facilities servicing these emerging fields of analytical testing.