What is Inverse Gas Chromatography (IGC)?
Inverse Gas Chromatography (IGC) is a gas phase technique for characterising surface and bulk properties of solid materials. The principles of IGC are very simple, being the reverse of a conventional gas chromatographic (GC) experiment. A cylindrical column is uniformly packed with the solid material of interest, typically a powder, fibre or film. A pulse or constant concentration of gas is then injected down the column at a fixed carrier gas flow rate , and the time taken for the pulse or concentration front to elute down the column is measured by a detector. A series of IGC measurements with different gas phase probe molecules then allows access to a wide range of phyisco-chemical properties of the solid sample. Analytical Gas Chromatography Inverse Gas Chromatography The injected gas molecules passing over the material adsorb on the surface with a partition coefficient KS: Ks = VN / Ws Where VN is the net retention volume the volume of carrier gas required to elute the injection thr
