I am currently working on greenhouse gas emission from agricultural soils, I would like to know whether it is possible or not to analyse greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrous oxides using HPLC techniques.
I also wish to mention that the gas sample collected are from soils treated with N-15 fertilisers.
Hi,
Yes it is possible.
You will find a part of the answer (details are not given) in this book :
https://www6.inra.fr/animal_emissions_eng/Home/News/Measuring-gaseous-emissions-from-animal-farms
And here : http://www.jove.com/video/52110/measurement-greenhouse-gas-flux-from-agricultural-soils-using-static
Hope it will help you
Best Regards
You can use HPLC to analyze such gases as CH4, CO2 and N2O but it will be NOT the optimal solution and you will have a lot of problems in adjustment of your HPLC instrument. First, your success depends on what kind of detector is available with your HPLC (UV-, photoarray, RI or mass-spec), with mass-spec there will be no problems, with other detectors you will have a really hard time. Second, you will have a huge amount of other non-gaseous compounds interfering with your analysis. Third, some fraction of gas samples will escape detection because the injection port in HPLC is designed for liquid, you will mostly catch dissolved gases. Fourth, time of analysis is much longer than with specialized gas analyzers such as NDIR, mass-spec, GC etc.
HPLC is a valuable instrument for analysis of wide range of soluble compounds. It is NOT wise to use it for such trivial task as detection of CO2. However if your lab DOES not have other resources, you can try HPLC as a temporary solution with rather low chance for success (although not zero).
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