GC/MS Troubleshooting #

library(pander)

Troubles I encounted: #

Ghost peak
Tailing peak
Baseline drift

Problems I have encountered:

1. We failed PT for a couple of compounds out of 32 compounds.
2. Source contamination:
    * Impurity of carrier gas. (high argon or nitrogen in Helium)
    * Leak at interfaces along the column connections.
    * O-ring
3. Purchase of customized standards.
4. Instrument performance: such as ghost peaks, tailing peaks,

Troubleshooting Guidelines #

Identify the symptom.
Go to the troubleshooting guide, and look up the observed effect that match the symptom.
Read possible cause and solution.

GC GC-MS Troubleshooting Part I; Top 6 Tips for Fixing a Leak #

March 23, 2012 by Sonya Pelia
There are many problems that can get you into trouble when using a GC and GC-MS. For me the most time consuming, costly, and frustrating is the leak. These things cause no end of problems in your GC-MS system. They will lower the sensitivity of the method, cause you to lose a lot of carrier gas, could damage your column, and damage the mass spectrometer source. You can get lucky and find them right away or they can take days to track down (the second is usually my luck). Many of these will be obvious but when you are the most upset they seem to be forgotten, unless that is only me but I’m guessing it’s not. GC GC-MS leak checking can be a little more difficult than on an LC. With an LC when there is a leak you get a puddle, there isn’t much puddling of carrier gas on a GC. Sometimes a leak on a GC-MS can be seen in the MS tune page, look for masses 18, 28, 32, 44 and their relative intensities.

Ghost Peaks