Nonclassical methods and opportunities in comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography

A typical schematic diagram of the GC??GC instrument is shown in Figure 1a. This is the system developed in our laboratory, which pioneered the use of cryogenic methods for modulation. A moving cryotrap affects the modulation process (see the following). The separation advantage of GC??GC is represented simply in Figure 1b. The one-dimensional (1-D) GC experiment suffers considerable overlap of peaks (Figure 1b), and heart-cutting methods are able to relieve this limitation for specific regions of the chromatogram (Figure 1c) by passing them to a second column for subsequent separation.