Preface

About 45 years ago, Werner Engewald, formally trained as organic chemist, started out to work in the field of gas chromatography, which was a young, but already aspiring technique back in those days. Three years later he taught the first class on GC and continued to teach course on GC and later capillary GC until today. Ever since, gas chromatography has matured into a widely distributed and extremely powerful analytical technique that can be found in most analytical laboratories. It is characterized by the high separation efficiency of capillary columns, sophisticated instrumentation including powerful detectors, automation, fairly short analysis times, as well as high precision and reproducibility in quantitative analysis. The application of GC significantly enhanced or even enabled our knowledge on the composition of complex samples, such as petroleum oil, flavor and fragrances, foodstuff, and environmental or biological samples. The combination of gas chromatography with mass spectrometry is unrivaled for the analysis of volatile compounds. Over the years, the interests, operating experiences, and tasks of the participants of the GC courses have changed. Owing to the ever-increasing time and cost pressure, simple operation, automation, high sample throughput, fast analyses, and high precision and reproducibility are more and more in the focus of attention. Then again, the demand for fast and cost-effective trace and ultra-trace analysis of organic compounds in complex matrices and the simultaneous analysis of as many analytes as possible is increasing. All the while, GC is often viewed as a service technique that does not require extensive training. The convenient and easy setup of modern instrumentation allows also the untrained user to generate seemingly appropriate data, but problems and questions will arise in case of malfunctions