title: Trapping efficiency of aqueous pollutants in multichannel thick-film silicone-rubber traps for capillary gas chromatography.
abstract: Established standard methods for analysing aqueous pollutants by capillary gas chromatography are cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive. With the aim of replacing the sample preparation procedures with direct concentrating and thermal desorption steps multichannel silicone-rubber traps were tested to determine breakthrough volumes and optimum accumulation conditions as a function of water flow-rate. Larger multichannel traps, consisting of 32 silicone tubes in parallel were made to increase the collection flow-rate through the trap with the same extraction efficiency of the initial smaller traps. It was shown that by increasing the number of parallel silicone tubes in the multichannel trap the breakthrough volume of benzene is 37 ml at a flow-rate of 75 microl/min and the trap displays 11 theoretical plates under these conditions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of Pretoria, South Africa.
authors.forename: E K
authors.initials: EK
authors.lastname: Ortner
authors.forename: E R
authors.initials: ER
authors.lastname: Rohwer
mesh_terms: D002849:Chromatography, Gas; D012015:Reference Standards; D012826:Silicone Elastomers; D014873:Water Pollutants / Q000032:analysis*
chemical_list: D012826:Silicone Elastomers; D014873:Water Pollutants