Development and validation of an improved, Thin Film Solid Phase Microextraction based, standard gas generating vial for the repeatable generation of gaseous standards

ABSTRACT This work presents the development and validation of novel thin film solid phase micro extraction (TF-SPME) based standard gas generating vials suitable for repeatable generation of gaseous standards for GC-MS analysis and quality control. The vials were developed using carbon mesh membranes loaded with pure polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), divinylbenzene (DVB/PDMS), hydrophilic-lipophilic balance (HLB/PDMS), and carboxen (Car/PDMS) sorbents that were then spiked with modified McReynolds standards including benzene, 2-pentanone, 1-nitropropane, pyridine, 1-pentanol, octane, dodecane, and hexadecane. Sorbent strength was determined to follow the aforementioned order, with pure PDMS presenting the weakest sorption capabilities and Car/PDMS the strongest. While the weaker, pure PDMS based gas generating vials transferred an instrument-overloading amount of McReynolds probes to the 1.1 mm DVB/PDMS SPME arrows used for extraction, vials prepared using Car/PDMS TF-SPME as a sorbent failed to provide consistently detectable amounts of analytes less volatile than 1-nitropropane. The DVB/PDMS and HLB/PDMS based vials were found to maintain optimal sorption capabilities for the tested analytes, providing a sorption strength strong enough to not exhibit any depletion in 10 replicate runs, while still delivering a consistent amount of all the regular McReynolds components. Moreover, with intra-vial %RSDs of 5% or less for all analytes tested, these HLB and DVB vials were found to deliver very good repeatability. After purposely submitting vials to 200 accelerated depletion extractions (1.1 mm DVB/PDMS arrow at 55 °C for 3 minutes), vials prepared with DVB/PDMS were found to deplete by 33%, 38%, 34%, 33%, 40%, and 33% while vials prepared with HLB/PDMS were found to deplete by 21%, 16%, 12%, 31%, 16% and 0% for benzene, 2-pentanone, 1-nitropropane, pyridine, 1-pentanol, and octane, respectively. When user typical extractions conditions were used instead (50/30 μm DVB/Car/PDMS SPME fiber at 35 °C for 1 minute), no depletion could be observed from the HLB/PDMS based vial while %RSDs ranged from 1.1-3.0% after the 300 extraction/desorption cycles. Finally, in efforts to demonstrate its real world applicability, the DVB/PDMS vial was used to evaluate the inter-fiber repeatability of commercial DVB/PDMS SPME arrows, with results demonstrating that arrows from a single package were statistically similar (ANOVA at 95% confidence).