GC and GC-MS: operation, troubleshooting and system suitability

Analysts running GC or GC-MS, and technical staff who review the data. Familiarity with the instrument is assumed.

The GC-MS content covers tuning, identification and confirmation criteria in addition to the chromatographic material.

The syllabus below is the standard shape of the course. It is adjusted to the matrices, methods and instruments you actually run, which is agreed before delivery rather than discovered on the day.

• Injection

  Split, splitless and on-column — discrimination and the errors each introduces

• Separation

  Columns, carrier gas, flow and oven programming

• Detectors

  FID, ECD and MS — what each sees and what each misses

• MS specifics

  Tuning, scan versus SIM, spectral matching and confirmation criteria

• System suitability

  Criteria for GC, and the additional checks MS detection requires

• Troubleshooting

  Leaks, active sites, retention drift, ghost peaks, contamination and inlet care

Courses are written around what a delegate can do afterwards, not what was presented to them. These are the outcomes this one is built to produce.

1. 01Choose and set an injection mode appropriate to the analyte and the concentration.
2. 02Diagnose the common GC faults from symptom to cause, starting with the inlet.
3. 03Apply identification and confirmation criteria properly for MS detection.
4. 04Maintain the system so that retention times stay stable across a sequence.

The inlet causes most GC problems and gets the least attention. Discrimination, active sites and leaks all produce results that are quantitatively wrong while looking chromatographically acceptable.

On the MS side the risk is identification confidence — a library match percentage is not a confirmation, and treating it as one is how a wrong compound gets reported with certainty.

Delivered over 2 days, at your site or at the laboratory, in English or Arabic. Sessions are built around real records, real data and real failures rather than slides of clause numbers, and the people delivering them spend the rest of the week doing the thing being taught.

Group size is agreed in advance — practical sessions are capped so that everyone works rather than watches. An attendance certificate is issued to each delegate on completion.

Ask about any subject not listed here. If it is not something we teach well, we will say so rather than build it for the sake of the booking.