Limits of separation of a multi-capillary column with mixtures of volatile organic compounds for a flame ionization detector and a differential mobility detector

The resolving power of a multi-capillary column (MCC) was evaluated using 14 mixtures of volatile organic compounds with known composition and complexity which was incremented stepwise up to 129 constituents. The number of constituents in these mixtures versus the number of components separated and detected with a flame ionization detector showed a proportional rise, with a decreasing slope, to 76 peaks after which a plateau was reached. This was improved 23.7% to 94 constituents, or 73% of all compounds in the mixture, after simplex optimization of carrier gas linear velocity, initial temperature and program rate. When the detection method was differential mobility spectrometry (DMS), additional selectivity was introduced through ion formation and separation. Fifty nine compounds were detected by DMS and 46 were separated by retention time; 13 were co-eluted and 7 of these were resolved by differential ion mobility (90% of all components ionized). A correlation of −0.412 between retention time for gas chromatography (GC) and differential mobility for DMS suggested a significant level of orthogonal character and the method of GC–DMS should not be seen as sequential only.