Combustion lon Chromatography (CIC)

University of Graz

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Short Description

Combustion Ion Chromatography (CIC) is a technique for the determination of sulphur and halogens (chlorine, fluorine…) in a wide variety of sample matrices. It combines on-line a combustion / pyrolysis oven with an ion-chromatography system with a conductivity detector. Solid or liquid samples are combusted/pyrolyzed in an argon/oxygen atmosphere and the resulting gaseous compounds are absorbed by a receiver liquid. This liquid (or part of it) in turn is then injected into the chromatographic system, separated on the column and the separated ions detected by the changing conductivity of the eluting solution.

The system is one of the more sensitive detection systems for fluorinated compounds via the fluorine atoms present in them and is intensively studied for its applicability to organofluorine compounds. CIC is the only option at the moment to determine for example the total amount of extractable organofluorine compounds (EOF) present in water. In turn EOF can be used as a proxy to determine whether elevated amounts of per- and polyfluorinated compounds are present.

Contact Person

Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Chem. Dr.rer.nat. PhD Jörg Feldmann

Research Services

please enquire
Prof. Dr. J. Feldmann (joerg.feldmann@uni-graz.at)
Dr. A. Raab (andrea.raab@uni-graz.at)

Methods & Expertise for Research Infrastructure

- Instrument and method development to lower the detection limits for the system
- Detecting sources of fluorine contamination
- Using the system as an “off-line detector” for the determination of fluorinated compounds in HPLC-fractions which do not show any signals when using an electrospray mass spectrometer as HPLC detector (non-ionisable per- and polyfluorinated compounds)