GC Column Conditioning

Description

Gas chromatography columns have less bleed than ever, including when they are right out of the box. However, it is still a best practice to condition a new column to your specific instrument and usage expectations. It is very important to make sure that you have no leaks and you are using clean, dry, and oxygen-free carrier gas when conditioning you GC columns. 

Additional Resources

• How to Condition a New Capillary GC Column

Recommended Tools & Parts

• Ceramic Scoring Wafer
• Electronic Leak Detector and ProFLOW 6000 Flowmeter

Transcript

Hello, everyone, it’s time for another Restek tip. Today, we're going to talk about conditioning our GC column, a simple process that we’ll do from time to time with just a few steps involved. The first thing that we will do is cut our column, making sure we get a nice clean square cut, and we’ll install in the inlet end of our gas chromatograph. We then want to run some clean, dry carrier gas through the column. We want to use that to purge any residual atmosphere from within the column. While we are doing that, for just about ten minutes, we do want to make sure that we do not increase the temperature. We’ll just do that at room temperature. Then, when it is time to condition our column the first thing we need to do is choose our conditioning temperature. We’ll choose either the maximum operating temperature of the column or 20 degrees above the temperature at which we intend to operate the column. We will choose whichever of those temperatures is lower. Then, we take the column up to that temperature and condition it for either about an hour or until the baseline settles down and becomes stable. Once that’s done we have a properly conditioned GC Column. 

Thank you very much for joining us for this Restek tip.