Review Article
Development of an On-line GC System using Existing Retired Equipment
Yuhui (Henry) Zhao*EPCOR Utilities Inc., Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
- *Corresponding Author:
- Yuhui (Henry) Zhao
EPCOR Utilities Inc., Edmonton, Alberta, T5K 0A5, Canada
Tel: 780-412-7612
E-mail: YZHAO@epcor.com
Received date: November 22, 2013; Accepted date: February 28, 2014; Published date: March 04, 2014
Citation: Zhao YH (2014) Development of an On-line GC System using Existing Retired Equipment. J Anal Bioanal Tech S12:008. doi: 10.4172/2155-9872.S12-008
Copyright: © 2014 Zhao YH. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
To ensure drinking water quality, continual monitoring of the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the source water and the treated water is very important for any water treatment plant. On-line, real-time information is crucial to water treatment engineers and operators. The concentration of VOCs provides such information. For VOCs analysis, gas chromatography (GC) is one of the best techniques due to its high sensitivity and selectivity. As a result, an inhouse on-line GC System was developed for this purpose at a water treatment plant. It included the following parts: a stream selection device to connect two sample streams; a self-cleaning filter to remove sands and suspended solids; a Purge-and-Trap (P&T) device to extract and concentrate the volatile compounds; a GC (from Hewlett-PackardTM) equipped with a Flame Ionization Detector (FID) to identify and quantify the compounds; a computer with WindowsTM XP plus ChemStation to control the sampling valves through a DAQ (from National InstrumentsTM) and to control the GC and P&T through a GPIB-USB interface (from AgilentTM). To minimize cost in the development of this system, shelved GC and P&T were used. These instruments have been retired from regular use but still in good working condition.