Differentiation and Determination of Fatty Acid Methyl Esters by Gas Chromatography – Vacuum Ultraviolet Spectroscopy

Gas Chromatography (GC) is a mature analytical technology used predominately for separating and quantifying the components of complex organic chemical mixtures. The addition of mass selective detectors has extended the use of GC to include compound identification. A wide range of columns and sample introduction techniques allow GC to solve most analytical problems for volatile and semi-volatile compounds. Absorption spectroscopy, although widely used in liquid chromatography, has not been widely adopted in gas chromatography due to the relative lack of absorption for most analytes in gas phase within traditional regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.