Quantitative Analysis of Explosives by Thermal Desorption–GC–MS Method

Introduction

With the growing public interest to military and homeland security, a reliable analytical technique for identification and quantitation of explosives is in high demand. Many methods have been proposed including colorimetric assays¹ and tandem mass spectrometry² . EPA has also published a standard method using GC-ECD and GC-MS³ to detect trace explosives. These methods either require a high resolution detector that is not ready for large-scale deployments, or focus on samples in solution. Recently, there are reports⁴ that established sampling protocols to collect analytes in vapor phase by using sorbent based thermal desorption tubes, followed by a quantitative GC-MS analysis. In this application note, a thermal desorption system from CDS Analytical coupled to mainstream GC-MS was tested on explosive standards spiked in thermal desorption tubes.