In-injection port thermal desorption and subsequent gas chromatography-mass spectrometric analysis of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and n-alkanes in atmospheric aerosol samples

The traditional approach for analysis of aerosol organics is to extract aerosol materials collected on filter substrates with organic solvents followed by solvent evaporation and analytical separation and detection. This approach has the weaknesses of being labor intensive and being prone to contamination from the extracting solvents. We describe here an alternative approach for the analysis of aerosol alkanes and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) that obviates the use of solvents. In our approach, small strips of aerosol-laden filter materials are packed into a GC split/splitless injector liner. Alkanes and PAHs on the filter are thermally desorbed in the injection port and focused onto the head of a GC column for subsequent separation and detection. No instrument modification is necessary to accommodate the introduction of the aerosol organics into the GC-MS system. Comparison studies were carried out on a set of 16 ambient aerosol samples using our in-injection port thermal desorption (TD) method and the traditional solvent extraction method. Reasonably good agreement of individual alkanes and PAHs by the two methods was demonstrated for the ambient samples. The in-injection port thermal desorption method requires much less filter material for detecting the same air concentrations of alkanes and PAHs.