COMPREHENSIVE 2-DIMENSIONAL GAS-CHROMATOGRAPHY (GCXGC) AND ITS APPLICABILITY TO THE CHARACTERIZATION OF COMPLEX (PETROCHEMICAL) MIXTURES

In general, petrochemical products contain only a limited number of ch emical classes of compounds (sample dimensionality). The enormous numb er of individual components within these classes, however, soon puts l imitations upon a single chromatographic technique when it comes to ad equate characterization of these products, Comprehensive two-dimension al gas chromatography (GCxGC) clearly opens the possibility of estimat ing the composition of hydrocarbon mixtures in a far more detailed fas hion than hitherto possible, Although the emphasis of papers on GCxGC thus far almost exclusively applies to the unsurpassed peak-capacity, in the oil industry there is a need for characterization, rather than for analyzing all the individual compounds, In principle a GCxGC syste m can provide an almost perfect match between its intrinsic properties and the dimensionality of oil samples, To establish the applicability of GCxGC towards petrochemical analytical challenges, a commercially available prototype instrument was subjected to an exhaustive characte rization of a typical hydrocarbon process stream and a fast characteri zation of a light gas oil, Although there are no fundamental limitatio ns towards the quantitative aspects of a GCxCC system, this paper conf ines itself to qualitative results only, Quantitative aspects of GCxGC mill be published in a forthcoming paper.