Chapter 15 Computer Enhanced Hyphenation in Chromatography Present and Future

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on computer enhanced hyphenation in chromatography. Chromatographers have always been interested in obtaining the maximum amount of information from their separations. From the outset, practitioners of chromatography have sought detectors of greater specificity, sensitivity, and generality. With the advent of fast inexpensive laboratory computers, more ambitious combinations involving multiple detectors have become common. This development is primarily the result of the availability of computers with sufficient computational speed and data storage capacity to deal with the large amount of information inherently available from such integrated analytical systems. There are currently two commercially available GC-IR-MS systems. GC-IR-MS system involves the simultaneous linkage of both a mass and an infrared spectrometer with a gas chromatograph. The first GC-IR-MS system introduced to the market was the Hewlett Packard GC-IRD-MSD system, which employed the optimized lightpipe-based infrared detector (IRD) in combination with the MSD mass spectrometer.