ONLINE SAMPLE TREATMENT - CAPILLARY GAS-CHROMATOGRAPHY

Sample pretreatment is often the bottleneck of a trace level analytica l procedure. In order to increase performance, increasing attention is therefore being devoted to combining sample pretreatment on-line with the separation technique that has to be used. In the present review, a variety of procedures in use today for sample treatment coupled on-l ine to capillary gas chromatography (GC) is briefly discussed. Special attention is devoted to coupled-column techniques such as SPE-GC and LC-GC (SPE, solid-phase extraction; LC, column liquid chromatography) which are topics of much current interest, also because of their frequ ent use in so-called hyphenated systems.