Fast gas chromatography for air monitoring: limits of detection and quantitation.

Gas chromatography has the potential to be a very fast method of air monitoring in the workplace and the community. The use of "fast" gas chromatographic (GC) instrumentation and methods may allow the completion of analyses in less than 10 sec when a flame ionization detector is used and in less than 30 sec when an electron capture detector is used. In this study, the fast GC system was evaluated as an air-monitoring tool for 41 different organic vapors at concentrations as low as 0.1 ppb.