Problems like Green House Effect and air pollution are now focused as globally environmental issues. One of the main causes of these problems is an emission gas generated from the combusted fossil fuel, which most familiarly represented as an automobile emission gas. Under the recent restriction, the standard of emitted gas is determined according to the sum of the concentration of all the components of HydroCarbon (HC) gas, a cause of the photochemical smog, by first obtaining a concentration for each component and by second multiplying each concentration by an ozonization coefficient.

To establish a new technology for analyzing an automobile emission gas, we performed R&D of the high speed, high sensitivity gas analysis system utilizing the technology of gas chromatography (GC). HC in the automobile emission gas consists of many components, which are generally low in their concentration of less than 10ppm. For the analysis of these components, GC technology of high separation analysis is most popularly applied. However, so far the GC requires approximately 1 hour for the analysis. The research described here aims at a technology to fulfill the high speed analysis of GC.

The significant technique of the research is as follows:

-Speeding up by the short column technology/high speed carrier gas technology

-High separation by the speeding up/temperature up cold trap technology

-High speed cycle analysis by mid point backflush(backflash?)technology

-Qualitative/quantitative analysis of GC unseparated peak using the high speed Fourier converted infrared spectrophotometer technology

The above research (elements) accomplishes high speed, high sensitivity GC analysis technology, to enable the speedy analysis of approximately 70 main components among HC by approximately 3 minutes.