Design and Performance of a Gas Chromatograph for Automatic Monitoring of Pollutants in Ambient Air

In recent years, interest in air pollution constituents has focused on carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons as prime components of polluted air. Instrumental methods have been developed, and commercial instruments for continuous monitoring of these components have been available for a number of years. For the measurement of carbon monoxide, non-dispersive infrared spectroscopy has been the accepted tool, in spite of its marginal sensitivity at low parts-per-million levels. For continuously monitoring total hydrocarbons, the hydrogen flame ionization analyzer has been widely accepted as the preferred method. The inadequacy of this latter method became evident when it was concluded that methane is non-reactive and cannot be considered a contaminant even though present at over 1 ppm in the earth's atmosphere. Hence, the need for measuring methane separately became apparent as a means of measuring the reactive and potentially harmful non-methane hydrocarbons fraction. A gas chromatographic method for the measurement of methane and total hydrocarbons which met these requirements has been developed. In this technique, methane was separated on conventional gas chromatographic columns and detected by a hydrogen flame ionization detector (FID) while the total hydrocarbons were obtained by introducing a second sample directly into the FID without separating the various components. The reactive, or non-methane hydrocarbons, were determined by difference. Carbon monoxide was also measured after converting to methane over a heated catalyst to render it detectable by the FID. The development of this method made it possible to perform these measurements with a sensitivity of as much as 1 ppm full scale and a minimum detectability of 20 ppb. Incorporating this technique, criteria were developed by APCO for a second generation continuous automatic instrument for atmospheric monitoring stations.