June 2008

A new technical note has recently been published which examines the potential of two recent GCMS-related developments for allowing more odour profiling applications to be carried out by automated laboratory instrumentation thus reducing costs.

The first of these relates to Markes’ latest analytical thermal desorption technology for gas extraction and selective concentration of aroma constituents. The second is a complementary innovation in GCMS reprocessing software which further enhances the sensitivity and identification of trace olfactory compounds in complex aroma profiles.

TDTS 84: Using thermal desorption to enhance aroma profiling by GC-MS – featuring example applications from the tobacco industry

Markes International has recently published an application note on the analysis of soil gas samples contaminated with a range of fuels.

• TDTS 80: Evaluation of a ‘Soil Gas’ sorbent tube for improving the measurement of volatile and semi-volatile fuel vapours in soil contaminated land 

The experimental results discussed show analysis of both light and middle distillate hydrocarbons. The data also show that sorbent tubes provide a representative profile and quantitative recovery of soil gas contaminants across a wide volatility range.

Markes has just announced that series 2 ULTRA™ 100-tube autosamplers now offer the option of automatic read and write of TubeTAG™ RFID tags. 

This means that series 2 ULTRA-UNITY TD users can permanently fix electronic TubeTAG labels to sorbent tubes allowing the history of every tube to be tracked throughout its life; sorbent combination, date of packing, number of thermal cycles and so on.

Full details are described in another new Markes application note (TDTS 82).

Continuing its tradition of innovation and applications development in thermal desorption-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (TD-GCMS), Markes International has published two new application notes for environmental monitoring: 

• TDTS 79: Air monitoring - the respective advantages and applications of canisters and tubes 
• TDTS 81: Analysis of canister air samples using cryogen-free thermal desorption in compliance with US EPA method TO-15

The full technical notes can be downloaded free-of-charge from this website here.