Thermal conductivity detector (tcd) for applications in fast gas-chromatographic (gc)
Publication date: 9 Gen 2014
The purpose of the present invention is to provide a new Thermal Conductivity Detector (TCD) specifically suited for fast Gas Chromatographic (GC) applications (gas analysis technique characterized by rapid analysis cycles). In the TCD of the invention, micro-electromechanical processing technique is used to fabricate a miniaturized device, which consists of two couples of platinum resistors put in a Wheatstone bridge configuration and suspended upon dielectric membranes at the centre of two flowing channels (reference channel and analytical channel). The novel aspect of the proposed layout, with respect to the prior art, consists in locating each couple of resistors over a single dielectric membrane, so that the length of the area occupied by each couple of resistors is shorter than a sample gas packet length to be analyzed, which prevents the formation of artifacts during peaks detection by means of fast GC …