Trimming a GC Column to Remove Contamination

Description 

The inlet end of our gas chromatography columns can collect a lot of contamination. GC column trimming is the simple process of removing a few centimeters of the inlet end of your analytical column in order to remove contamination. This type of GC column maintenance can be a quick fix to help with contamination problems like tailing or some response variation.

Additional Resources

• Half the Column, Same Chromatogram. Trimming your GC Column and Maintaining Resolution
• EZGC Method Translator and Flow Calculator

Restek Recommended Tools & Parts

• Ceramic Scoring Wafer

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another Restek tip. In this video, we're going to be talking about column trimming. It's a really simple technique that we can use to remove some contamination from our GC columns. Very straightforward, as well. All we're going to do is uninstall our column and chop off about the first 15 centimeters or so. That's the area where most of the contamination accumulates on our column, on the inlet side of things.

After we've done that trimming, we can simply re-install our column and proceed as usual. One other note, though. It is important for us to update our instrument software with our new column length. That software uses physical dimensions of the column—ID and length specifically—in order to help regulate pressure and flow. As we trim a column over time, we want to make sure that we keep updating our column length in the software.

With that in mind, that's all that's involved with trimming a column to remove contamination. That's it! Thank you for joining us for this Restek tip.