(51b) Advances and Applications of Comprehensive Two-Dimensional Gc in the Chemical Industry

This presentation will review recent developments of comprehensive two-dimensional GC (GCxGC). GCxGC is a major development in separation technology during the last decade. GCxGC has greatly enhanced resolving power and gives visualization of structural group distribution. Applications using GCxGC will be presented to show how GCxGC can effectively solve some problems in the chemical industry including hydrocarbon feed streams and wash oils. In the first example, GCxGC was used to identify possible catalyst poisons in polymer processes. Comparing to other approaches identifying trace level components in hydrocarbon streams, GCxGC has greatly enhanced separation power and sensitivity to effectively address this type of problems, it can effectively segregate possible catalyst poisons to a region apart from non-offending species. In another example, we will show how the GCxGC group separations can be used in fast screening of wash oils used in ethylene plant. It is very effective to determine total aromatics comparing to the regular GC methods.