HYPHENATED HIGH-PERFORMANCE LIQUID-CHROMATOGRAPHY CAPILLARY GAS-CHROMATOGRAPHY

Coupled chromatographic techniques involve hyphenation at the front end of the main separation step and will increasingly be required for laboratories to carry out routine analyses of increasing complexity in the future. Thousands of samples have been analysed by automated liquid chromatography-gas chromatography (LC GC), saving around 15 000 h of sample preparation time and allowed determinations which would otherwise have been out of reach for a small government laboratory to be carried out. The techniques presently applied, however, exploit just a small fraction of the possible LC GC transfer techniques, of the many LC techniques available, and of auxiliary techniques, such as on-line solvent evaporation and on-line solute derivatization.