Treatise on Present Practice and Perspectives of MDGC

The state of affairs of multidimensional gas chromatography (MDGC) at present is no more than an implementation of a two-dimensional form (2D-GC) reducing its scope to the setup known as GCxGC. Introduced in 1991 with great expectation, however, GCxGC still happen to fall short of realizing the anticipated capabilities despite continuous efforts made over the elapsed 35 years. This got quantitative formulation in regard of separation performance as early as 2008, proving that it failed to be competitive with a well-governed 1D-GC. The present paper highlights further limitations of GCxGC: inadequate operation burdened with shortcomings are presented via examples taken from GCxGC literature; crowning the list with the inability to meet fundamental requirement that if a compound can be analyzed by 1D-GC it must remain analyzable by MDGC. The repertoire of the intertwining issues, each of which unavoidably rigs or even hamstrings the others, highlights that GCxGC has a built-in self-limiting feature. Attempts to overcome confinements via loosening the binding conditions turned GCxGC back to the form it emerged from decades ago, yet without getting rid of the hampering curbs. The unfavorable overall picture forces to consider viabilities of other concepts, with focus on avoiding errors and pitfalls of GCxGC while fulfilling basic requirements of MDGC. In our view, there are two alternatives. One is ZGC, principle of which was introduced in 1989, requirements and potential of which are presented here in more detail; the other is a concept called Quantum-GC, which is presented as an introductory approach.