Lowering Detection Limits for 1,4-Dioxane

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been living in Pennsylvania for 10 months now.  I’m repeatedly told how fortunate I am that my first winter was the most mild anyone can remember.  I’ve also been at Restek for 10 months now, and the results of my work in the applications lab are starting to make their way out as finished products.

The first major application I worked on was employing Concurrent Solvent Recondensation – Large Volume Splitless Injection (CSR-LVSI) to lower the method detection limits for EPA Method 522 – 1,4-Dioxane in Drinking Water.  This technique is so impressive because we’ve demonstrated that it is possible to employ large volume injections (10 µL and larger) in a standard split/splitless inlet instead of an expensive Programmed Temperature Vaporization (PTV) or Multimode Inlet (MMI) without any backflash or other negative effects.  All that is required is a retention gap for proper wetting of the column, a tapered inlet liner with deactivated glass wool, and a fast autosampler injection. I posted my initial results on the Restek blog. We were able to detect 1,4-dioxane at concentrations as low as 0.0050 µg/L in fortified lab samples. The full application note can be found on the Restek website, and a condensed version was published in the June edition of the LCGC Application Notebook.

Jack Cochran, one of the paper’s co-authors, will be presenting a poster on the technique next week at the Florida Pesticide Residue Workshop (FPRW).  His oral presentation (Wednesday, July 18th, 8:55 am) covers low level analysis of untargeted contaminants by combining CSR-LVSI with GCxGC-TOFMS.

I will be presenting Use Large Volume Splitless Injection with an Unmodified Split/Splitless GC Inlet to Lower Reporting Limits for 1,4-Dioxane in Drinking Water Analyzed by EPA Method 522 on August 9th in Washington D.C. at the National Environmental Monitoring Conference (NEMC) in the morning topics in drinking water session.