A GC/FT-IR Compound Identification System

Abstract
The use of GC/IR for the routine analysis of organic pollutants can result in the collection of thousands of interferograms for each analysis performed, requiring days to be reduced to useful information. The time consuming process of evaluating such data necessitates the development of appropriate data processing systems. The semi-automatic GC/IR compound identification has been designed with the following goals in mind: the rapid reconstruction of the original GC trace from the collection of interferograms, the selection of appropriate (information containing) interferograms for further processing, and the searching of the spectra transformed from these interferograms against a library of known spectra. It is also desirable that the program be able to function with or without operator intervention at critical points and that intermediate results be saved for later review, editing, and reprocessing. These goals have been met with a program package designed to run on a Nova minicomputer using the RDOS disk operating system. The program allows the operator to set up all run time parameters and program instructions initially, after which the program may run unattended. Intermediate results may be printed or plotted at a later time, and such results from separate GC/IR experiments kept in uniquely named disk files. The structure and operation of the program package is described.