Multiplexing Techniques for High-Throughput Gas Chromatography

In the search for new catalysts, drugs, and organic syntheses, large libraries of substances must be analyzed. Gas chromatography (GC) is a popular analytical technique, as it is accurate, sensitive, and reproducible, although it is fairly slow (minutes to days for full analysis). This study focused on applying â??multiplexingâ?, or packaging multiple signals together into one signal, to GC. A Hadamard Transform (HdT), a variation of the Fourier Transform, was used to significantly expedite GC by deconvolving multiple overlapping sample signals. To validate the procedure, a set of GC data was simulated, and the simulated data was compared to experimentally obtained data. HdT analysis was performed on the simulated data and the deconvolved â??overview chromatogramâ? was obtained. The original simulated data was then recalculated from the deconvolved signals, which showed that the data deviated significantly from the initial data, probably due to inaccuracies in the overview chromatogram. In the future, the deconvolution process will be improved upon and further validated. Lastly, this procedure will be applied to reactions of interest, such as dry reforming and tri-reforming.