Dielectric barrier discharge carbon atomic emission spectrometer: universal GC detector for volatile carbon-containing compounds.

It was found that carbon atomic emission can be excited in low temperature dielectric barrier discharge (DBD), and an atmospheric pressure, low power consumption, and compact microplasma carbon atomic emission spectrometer (AES) was constructed and used as a universal and sensitive gas chromatographic (GC) detector for detection of volatile carbon-containing compounds. A concentric DBD device was housed in a heating box to increase the plasma operation temperature to 300 °C to intensify carbon atomic emission at 193.0 nm. Carbon-containing compounds directly injected or eluted from GC can be decomposed, atomized, and excited in this heated DBD for carbon atomic emission. The performance of this new optical detector was first evaluated by determination of a series of volatile carbon-containing compounds including formaldehyde, ethyl acetate, methanol, ethanol, 1-propanol, 1-butanol, and 1-pentanol, and absolute limits of detection (LODs) were found at a range of 0.12-0.28 ng under the optimized conditions. Preliminary experimental results showed that it provided slightly higher LODs than those obtained by GC with a flame ionization detector (FID). Furthermore, it is a new universal GC detector for volatile carbon-containing compounds that even includes those compounds which are difficult to detect by FID, such as HCHO, CO, and CO2. Meanwhile, hydrogen gas used in conventional techniques was eliminated; and molecular optical emission detection can also be performed with this GC detector for multichannel analysis to improve resolution of overlapped chromatographic peaks of complex mixtures.