Chemical warfare agent detection in complex environments with comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography

Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GCxGC) is an emerging technology for chemical separation that provides an order-of-magnitude increase in separation capacity over traditional gas chromatography. GCxGC separates chemical species with two capillary columns interfaced by two-stage thermal desorption. Because GCxGC is comprehensive and has high separation capacity, it can perform multiple traditional analytical methods with a single analysis. GCxGC 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, GCxGC clearly separates the nerve agents from the thousands of other chemicals in the sample. The GCxGC data is visualized, processed, and analyzed as a two-dimensional digital image using a software system for GCxGC image processing developed at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln.