Determination of Volatile Substances in Forensic Samples by Static Headspace Gas Chromatography

The technique of static headspace gas chromatography has great acceptance in the forensic field, especially for the determination of ethanol in biological samples (Macchia et al., 1995; Tagliaro et al., 1992), so most forensic laboratories in the world have this equipment and perform this analysis on a routine basis, but in many of these laboratories, equipment is exclusively employed to determine ethanol, even when this technique can be used to determine many other substances of toxicological interest, volatile substances, without major changes to the equipment (Seto, 1994), thus we can conclude that these laboratories do not exploit all the possibilities of the technique.