Abstract
Trace amounts of explosives compounds, separated from cleaned-up extracts of handswabs and clothing debris by high-performance liquid chromatography, may be trapped from the chromatography effluent onto a porous polymer (acrylonitrile or methacrylate copolymer) microcolumn for confirmatory examination by gas chromatography (GC). The microcolumn eluate is injected directly into a GC retention gap of unmodified silica, whereby explosives down to HMX in volatility may be chromatographed. Retention gaps with variously modified