In recent years, capillary gas chromatography (GC) with Fourier Transform I
nfrared (FT-IR) and/or mass spectral (MS) detection has become a primary an
alytical tool for qualitative and quantitative analysis of complex mixtures
. Because of the wide range of applications, the analytical requirements ha
ve motivated a variety of chromatographic and detection developments. This
review examines those, illustrating with applications that demonstrate the
power of GC and multidimensional GC-MS, GC-FT-IR and GC-FT-IR-MS systems fo
r solving a variety of analytcal problems. In addition, the article discuss
es the integrated performance of such analytical systems with the aid of re
cent sample introduction and computer data analysis advances. (C) 1999 Else
vier Science B.V. All rights reserved.