Development of a lab on a chip comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography

20世纪世纪分析科学的一项重大成就是开发了检测高度复杂混合物中痕量化学品的技术，以及万亿分之一（pptv; 1皮摩尔/摩尔）及以下的技术。这一领域的技术发展主要集中在敏感性和特异性问题上，往往以单位成本、规模或操作便利性为代价。因此，21世纪世纪的一个主要挑战是开发自动化的分离、检测和传感器技术，并将它们结合在一起，以形成高度特定的测量技术，其形式是低成本、完全自主的，但具有当今基于实验室的仪器的所有功能。该后续资助项目旨在开发一种低成本，低能耗，高分辨率的综合二维气相色谱仪（GCXGC），能够从复杂的样品基质中分离单个物种。该项目将开发的核心技术是在碱金属氧化物玻璃单片上湿法蚀刻微米级的微型气相色谱装置/所谓的芯片实验室。这是一项非常新的工程技术，目前正在通过对芯片实验室微流体的兴趣激增，积极开发生物化学和制药应用。玻璃单片GCXGC柱的初步建设已经进行，重要的下一步是建设和验证的集成原型，结合现有技术和开发专业的控制电子设备。该项目的商业目标是最终创建一家分拆公司，生产非常便携的GCXGC系统，产品价格<10，000英镑。这项技术的驱动力是缺乏一种技术解决方案，以廉价的方式分析复杂的气体混合物，而不需要收集气体样品并将其送回实验室，使用昂贵和庞大的设备进行分析。开发的基本原理是环境污染物测量中VOC数据的瓶颈，例如2002年英国自动碳氢化合物空气质量网络的大幅减少，但我们认为该技术具有更广泛的应用和巨大的市场潜力。

A major analytical science success of the 20th Century has been the development of technology to detect trace level chemicals in highly complex mixtures and at the parts per trillion level (pptv; 1picomole per mole) and below. Technology development in this area has been primarily focussed on issues of sensitivity and specificity often at the expense of unit cost, size or operational ease. A major challenge for the 21st Century is therefore to develop miniaturised separation, detection and sensor technologies and harness them together to form highly specific measurement techniques in forms that are low cost, fully autonomous and yet which have all the capabilities of today's laboratory based instruments. This follow on funding project aims to develop a miniaturised low cost, low energy, high resolution comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatograph (GCXGC), capable of isolating individual species from complex sample matrices. The core technologies to be developed in this project are micro fabricated gas chromatography devices wet-etched at the micron level onto alkali metal oxide glass monoliths / a so-called lab-on-a-chip. This is very new engineering technology and is one which is now being activity exploited for biochemical and pharmaceutical applications through the explosion of interest in lab-on-a-chip microfluidics. The initial construction of a glass monolithic GCXGC column has been undertaken and the essential next step is the construction and validation of an integrated prototype incorporating existing technologies and developing specialised control electronics. The commercial objective of this project is ultimately the creation of a spin-out company manufacturing very portable GCXGC systems with a product price of <£10,000. The driver for this technology is the lack of a technical solution to the problem of analysing complex gas mixtures cheaply without requiring the collection of gas samples and returning them to the laboratory for analysis using expensive and bulky equipment. The founding rationale for the development has been the bottleneck in VOC data in environmental pollutant measurements, such as the large reduction in the UK automated hydrocarbon air quality network in 2002, but we consider that the technology has wider applications with significant market potential.