Chemical Warfare Agent Detection in Complex Environments with Comprehensive Two-Dimensional Gas Chromatography

Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GC×GC) is an emerging technology for chemical separation that provides an order-of-magnitude increase in separation capacity over traditional gas chromatography. GC×GC separates chemical species with two capillary columns interfaced by two-stage thermal desorption. Because GC×GC is comprehensive and has high separation capacity, it can perform multiple traditional analytical methods with a single analysis. GC×GC has great potential for a wide variety of environmental sensing applications, including detection of chemical warfare agents (CWA) and other harmful chemicals. This paper demonstrates separation of nerve agents sarin and soman from a matrix of gasoline and diesel fuel. Using a combination of an initial column separating on the basis of boiling point and a second column separating on the basis of polarity, GC×GC clearly separates the nerve agents from the thousands of other chemicals in the sample. The GC×GC data is visualized, processed, and analyzed as a two-dimensional digital image using a software system for GC×GC image processing developed at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln.