A Guide to the Novel Shimadzu GC-MS BFB Tuning for the Analysis of Volatile Organic Compounds in the Environmental Samples

Introduction

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) establishes strict BFB tuning criteria to ensure the quality of the results when analyzing volatile compounds. Due to many challenges inherent to GC- MS Purge and Trap instruments required for this analysis, several GC-MS instruments have difficulties in passing the required US EPA BFB tuning criteria or remaining stable over prolonged operations period. In this study, the performance of a novel BFB tuning algorithm was demonstrated on the latest Shimadzu GCMS-QP2020 NX. The demonstration study consisted of two phases that comprised evaluating the BFB tune and testing the stability of internal standards and surrogates for EPA methods 524.2 and 624/8260. The results illustrate that the BFB spectra was able to pass all EPA requirements of methods 524.2 and 624/8260 criteria for the analysis of at least 1407 samples for over 4 months. Moreover, these results confirm that the novel tuning algorithm used with the GCMS-QP2020 NX is a robust tool for performing EPA methods 524.2 and 624/8260.

December 1, 2022 GMT