It can be done but some columns are damaged by water so check with the manufacturer.

The link below will take you to an example of  this approach (it just came out at the top of a quick Google search)  but there are several other methods published.

However whilst the absolute sensitivity of a MS detector is good you will only be injecting a very small volume of water and thus the relative sensitivity may be not as good as you might be expecting.

You therefore may prefer to use a solvent extraction step, solid phase extraction step or a purge and trap method to both remove the potential damage to your column and give a better sensitivity.

thanks. I want to know if the water can damage ionization source or not? 

Hi

it seems that the link did not  upload.

http://www.sapub.org/global/showpaperpdf.aspx?doi=10.5923/j.ajee.20120203.04

Actually I have only personally used direct aqueous injection GCMS with an ion trap and then only for compounds which were retained   longer than the water so I was able to use a delay so as not to expose the hot filament to the water. I am not sure that it is absolutely necessary.The turbo pump was good enough to get the water out of the trap before I needed to start analysing. I think the capacity of the pump is important. 

However there are lots of examples in the literature where quad's have been used.

My best advice is to speak to the manufacturer of the instrument..

By and large, avoid water in samples prepared for GC-MS. Most columns are not aqueous compatible. Try extracting in low BP solvents or use SPE modules.

Generally speaking, that's a bad idea. Besides purely chromatographic considerations (e.g. column compatibility), water affects source degradation by oxydation and dirt buildup and severely alters ion multipliers sensitivity. On the other hand, quads can easily cope with moisture in solvent samples.

Usually researchers avoid that completely as it damages the column, but one solution is to buy a purging trap compartment which volatilizes your compounds. Another solution is to do liquid-liquid extraction by adding an organic solvent like hexane or MTBE then inject only the organic fraction of the extracted sample.

Hope this helps.

I would not inject an aqueous sample in a GCMS which is not made for it.

You can choose different solutions according to the amount of sample : if you have large amount, it is better to extract with an organic solvent. With a small amount you can use without extraction either Headspace for volatile compounds or SPME with a fiber adapted to your target compounds.

I do not recommend injecting aqueous samples in a GC. It is not reproducible, may introduce non-volatile compounds in the GC inlet and colunm, leads to GC stationary phase to degradate, and so on. Some sample preparation method should be applied according to the type of sample and analyte.

I recently attending a chromatography seminar given by Agilent.  They stated that water is not nearly so detrimental to columns as once thought that it was.  Oxygen is the real culprit.  That being said, we typically only inject headspace water vapor onto a PLOT Q column, or liquid onto a DB-VRX.  You must inject the smallest amount of liquid at the lowest temperature possible due to the extremely high expansion coefficient of water.  It is very easy to overload your inlet liner and contaminate the carrier gas pathway.

Mario, I should have also noted that we inject 1 ml of heated, acidified aqueous headspace vapor onto a PLOT Q or Restek Q-Bond without [apparent] harm.  Using H2 as the carrier gas, we can leave this system up and running for up to year at a time without contamination nor degradation of the signal.  Injecting liquid extracts invariably causes more contamination with our system, requiring liner/septum/seal replacement and column cutting.  We need to retrofit to the Agilent ultimate union, using just 1 m of "guard" column before the union with backflushing.  I suspect we'll rarely ever break vacuum on the MS again for column swapping (pressurize the union) or cleaning.

Can we use 20% aqueous IPA for GC purity analysis. Please suggest

Injecting a aqueous sample will seriously cause contamination in quadruple of MASS detector. So mostly water is avoided in GC/MS spectroscopy.