Innovative headspace sampling technology offers up to 100 times the sensitivity for reduced detection limits in gas chromatography
PerkinElmer Life and Analytical Sciences has announced a new sampling system for gas chromatography, allowing low detection limits for volatile compounds.
The new TurboMatrix headspace sampling system, incorporating a built-in trap option, offers a significantly higher level of performance compared with conventional headspace or purge-and-trap sampling systems.
The system uses a new patent-pending sample trapping approach that efficiently extracts analytes from water and other sample matrices and injects them into the gas chromatograph.
The new TurboMatrix system is able to maintain consistent temperature, pressure and flow conditions from sample to sample, ensuring high precision and accuracy.
Performance is also maximised by incorporation of a patent-pending-design dry purge that removes water efficiently.
Compared with purge-and-trap technology which requires tedious sample preparation and lengthy bake-out times, sample and system preparation are simplified, enhancing throughput with the headspace trap.
"If you're using gas chromatography in the environmental, pharmaceutical, forensics, food packaging, and chemical industries you can benefit from this new headspace sampling technology," said Jon Rennert, vice president and general manager, environmental and chemical analysis, at PerkinElmer.
"Our customers tell us that they want to increase productivity through faster, more sensitive analyses as well as through significantly less cleanup per sample.
"This new TurboMatrix system exceeds market expectations by also making this breakthrough technology very affordable so that total cost of ownership is reduced".
The new system is especially valuable for labs such as those dealing with environmental contaminants in water and soil samples, forensics for volatile compounds at the lowest possible detection levels, or pharmaceuticals and food packaging where frequent QC batch testing is necessary.
Time is also saved through concurrent thermostatting of up to 12 pending sample vials during analysis runs.
The system incorporates automatic leak checking that ensures analytical integrity should a vial leak, in which case the system will optionally stop the analysis according to the user's preference and flag the problem in the sample run log.
In addition, a column isolation feature allows the carrier gas flow to be maintained during servicing of the headspace and trapping system even when the headspace instrument is turned off. This feature is particularly useful when mass spectrometric detection is being used with the gas chromatograph.
The new TurboMatrix headspace sampler is completely compatible with all generations of gas chromatographs.
PerkinElmer says it is also the only vendor that designs and manufactures a complete solution - from sample handling to data handling.
The TurboMatrix headspace sampler will be available globally by the end of 2003.
