Thread:War Pig1237/@comment-26295802-20170719193212/@comment-25101690-20170730084541

Campinator wrote:

Glflegolas wrote: I'm changing the column and the detector of the GC.

Glflegolas (admin) Send a Messenger  23:20, July 29, 2017 (UTC) Could I get an explain on that? I probably could rustle up a Wikipedia summary or something if need be but you seem a little more qualified than me to be explaining these things :P

A GC is a machine that evaporates a mix of substances into gas and separates it into its individual substances to measure the quantity of each substance contained. A tiny portion of the substance is injected at one end, where the machine then slowly heats up to vaporise the substances while also sending a "carrier gas" (usually helium) through a long and very thin tube (the "column", a few meters long, rolled up inside the machien to save space). When the substances vaporise, the carrier gas pushes them onward through the column. Each substance can hold onto the walls of the column differently well, so the substance with the weakest binding force will leave the column first ("washed away" by the carrier gas). At the end of the column is a detector to detect which gas is currently coming out. There are various methods for detecting. In the end you get the graph of the detector measurement, with peaks marking where the detector measured a gas.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Gas_chromatograph-vector.svg/500px-Gas_chromatograph-vector.svg.png