Author: RPW Scott
Book:Gas Chromatography - Tandem Techniques
Section:GC-Tandem Introduction Historical
as, within the precision possible for practical retention measurements in GC, many substances would have very close retention characteristics and, thus, in practice, retention data would have very limited use for solute identification. Another problem associated with solute identification from retention data is the assumed availability of suitable reference samples to provide reference retention data. For most unknown samples, reference compounds are not available and, thus, retention values for any unknown solute is of little use for identification purposes. Unfortunately, even today, a half a century later, neither the thermodynamic theory of retention nor the interaction theory of retention are sufficiently well developed to be able to calculate the retention of a specific solute on a specific phase system from basic physical chemical data. As a consequence, reference retention data can not be calculated as an alternative to using a reference sample. It follows


