Hyphenated Techniques in Gas Chromatography

Hyphenated gas chromatography (GC) (Chaturvedi & Nanda, 2010; Coleman III & Gordon, 2006) mainly refers to the coupling of the high-performance separation technique of gas chromatography with 1) information-rich and sophisticated GC detectors which otherwise can be mostly operated as a stand-alone instrument for chemical analysis, and 2) automated online sample preparation systems. The term “hyphenation” was first adapted by Hirschfeld in 1980 to describe a possible combination of two or more instrumental analytical methods in a single run (Hirschfeld, 1980). It is of course not the case that you can couple GC to any detection systems, although many GC hyphenations have been investigated and / or implemented as to be discussed in this chapter. The aim of this coupling is obviously to obtain an information-rich detection for both identification and quantification compared to that with a simple detector (such as thermal-conductivity detection (TCD), flame-ionization detection (FID) and electron-capture detector (ECD), etc.) for a GC system.