Air and Water Analysis

Air is vital to all living organisms. However, the air that we breathe in modern civilization is contaminated. Pollutants include particulate matter and chemical compounds, such as volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds (VOCs and SVOCs). Air pollution is a health risk of global significance. According to the WHO, it causes around 7 million deaths per year. Air monitoring is therefore a critically important analytical field.

According to the U.S. EPA, air pollution can originate from various sources, both natural and artificial, including motor vehicles, industrial facilities, household combustion devices, and forest fires. Air pollutants include particulate matter  (like dust, soot or microplastics), gas, vapor, or any combination thereof, which are emitted into or enter the ambient air and modify the atmosphere's natural characteristics. When these substances are in concentrations that interfere with human health and welfare, or produce other harmful environmental effects, it is considered air pollution. Given that most of our time is spent indoors, Indoor Air and Workplace Air Monitoring (Occupational Hygiene) are also increasingly in demand.  

GERSTEL supplies highly efficient and versatile systems for air monitoring and analysis that have been proven in practice in laboratories world-wide.

The GERSTEL thermal desorption instrument (TD 3.5+) transfers analytes from air samples collected on standard 3.5" and GERSTEL 3.5"+ sorbent tubes to the gas chromatograph (GC) for analysis compliant with international standard air analysis methods.

Analysis of up to hundreds of tubes in one fully automated sequence can be performed by the GERSTEL MultiPurpose Sampler (MPS). The MPS also performs spiking of tubes with internal standard or calibration standards for improved efficiency, accuracy and trueness. Thermal desorption can also be used to analyze particles collected on filters for potential emissions through thermal extraction of VOCs and SVOCs.