Decreasing the uncertainty of gas chromatographic quantification using the solvent’s signal in the method of external standard

Abstract

Uncertainties of the results of quantitative determinations in gas chromatography using the methods based on the absolute peak areas (including the external standard method) are rather “sensitive” to the reproducibility of injections. The effective way to compensate for such errors is to introduce the additional standards into the samples, followed by replacing the absolute peak areas by their ratios to peak areas of the standards. It is important to underline that any constituents of the samples can be used as additional standards, including the solvents. Solvents can be used for these purposes even if the heights of their peaks are restric­ted when the analytical signals exceed the amplifier limits. Using the relative peak areas does not require any extra sample processing besides the registration of peak areas for solvents. Comparing the commonly known and modified methods of external stan­dard demonstrates that using the relative peak areas instead of the absolute ones does not influence the overall precision of determinations (according to the criterion “intro­duced-determined”) but improve the reproducibility by 2-3 times. The problem of increasing the reliability of such statistical evaluations of results is discussed and to solve it, it is proposed to change the “design” of the experiments. Instead of series of successive analyses of similar origin samples, the use of parallel determinations is preferable. This can be realized, for example, during the fulfillment of student’s practical works.