Gas Chromatagraph: Continuous or Plused Operation?

[flatmaster]

I'm intreaged by our history of space exploration. On Pioner Venus2, four sacrificial probes were sent through the Venusian atmosphere while they quickly streamed back their data to the orbitor. They were destroyed when impacting the surface. One of the devices on the probes was a gas chromatagraph. The gas chromatagraph I know of can only take a given sample of gas, and determines the identity of the gas by the amount of time it takes for that gas to travel through the column.

My question is can you make a continusly running or plused GC? I assume you could make a really short column, but this would reduce your resolution on the time-in-column measurement.

 

[chemisttree]

Yes, you could make a pulsed GC. You could also operate several colums at once in that pulsed mode.

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=31193&fbodylongid=736
This one used a quadrapole mass spectrometer as the detector capable of identifying isotope ratios, but the front end is still a robotic GC analyzing atmosphere.

 

[Topher925]

I recently attended a lecture by my schools chemistry department where they built a two-dimensional (GCxGC) chromatagraph using two columns, one being pulsed. So yes you can do it.