Thermal desorption of semivolatile organic compounds

Thermal desorption is a well-described, often-used technique for the analysis of volatile organic compounds (VOC). Since an increasing demand for sensitive determination of volatile organics exists, there are currently efforts to utilize procedures for the VOC determination also for semi-volatile substances. It is, however, not as simple as just to increase the thermal desorption temperature or time of a standard VOC desorption method. Many details like flow rates, transfer line temperatures and materials may pose pitfalls to the analyst. A number of them is adressed in this paper, and the performance of a method for thermal desorption of some high-boiling compunds on different thermal desorption systems is shown.