About Total Organic Carbon Analyzer

Explain Each Instrument In Less Than 200 Words. The Instruments Are Toc Analyzer And Gas Chromotography. Be Sure To Include a Picture Of Both Instruments.

The Total Organic Carbon analyzer help in the determination of the quantity of carbon present in a water sample. The process involves acidification of the sample and flushing it with either helium or nitrogen the sample, which helps remove the inorganic carbon and leave only the organic carbon sources that need to be measured. It uses a catalytic oxidation combustion technique applied at a high temperature that may rise to 720° C to convert the organic carbon into carbon dioxide (CO₂). This CO₂ helps in oxidation, which is assessed with a Non-dispersion Infra-Red (NDIR) sensor. According to Zhu et al. (2019), TOC may be used to quantify the organic carbon present in the soil or geological formation, such as source rock for a petroleum play where 2% is stated to be a rough minimum. The subtracting the inorganic carbon from the total carbon that yields TOC. Another variant of TOC analysis involves removing total inorganic carbon and then measures the leftover carbon.

Figure 1: Principle of TOC analyzer

Gas chromatography (GC) is an methodical technique used to discrete the chemical elements of a trial and thus, allow the detection of the components. It helps in determining the presence or absence as well as the amount present in the sample. The chemical elemets are commonly either organic molecules or gasous substance. It is important to note that the component needs to be unstable with a molecular weight of below 1250 Da and thermal stable. This is widely used in many industries for quality control in manufacturing various products that include cars to chemicals and pharmaceuticals. It is also used for research purposes that help in the analysis of meteorites and natural products (Johnsen et al. 2017). It is used in the environmental, food industry and forensic. The gas chromatographs are commonly used with a mass spectrometer (GS-MS) for the identification of the individual chemical components. GC used carrier gas in the segegration that plays an important part in the mobile phase. The carrier gas help in transporting the sample molecules through the GC system in an ideal manner without any damage. This sample is introduced in the GC either with a syringe or transfer from an auto sampler, which helps extract the chemical component from either solid or liquid matrixes.

Figure 2: Gas chromatography

Johnsen, L.G., Skou, P.B., Khakimov, B. and Bro, R., 2017. Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry data processing made easy. Journal of Chromatography A, 1503, pp.57-64.

Mahmoud, A.A., Elkatatny, S., Ali, A., Abdulraheem, A. and Abouelresh, M., 2020, January. Estimation of the total organic carbon using functional neural networks and support vector machine. In International Petroleum Technology Conference. OnePetro.

Špánik, I. and Machyňáková, A., 2018. Recent applications of gas chromatography with high‐resolution mass spectrometry. Journal of separation science, 41(1), pp.163-179.

Zhu, L., Zhang, C., Zhang, C., Zhang, Z., Nie, X., Zhou, X., Liu, W. and Wang, X., 2019. Forming a new small sample deep learning model to predict total organic carbon content by combining unsupervised learning with semisupervised learning. Applied Soft Computing, 83, p.105596.