Gaseous reagents, diffusion into liquids

In flow-injection analysis, volatile analytes or analyte compounds may be separated from interferents in an ill-defined sample stream and transplanted into a liquid or gaseous acceptor stream with well-defined composition. Reaction conditions for effecting the gas-liquid separation and detection of the separated species may be optimized independently, often greatly enhancing the selectivity of the determinations. The gas-liquid separations are effected through on-line separators incorporated in the FI manifolds. The effects of the separation process are often equivalent to batch distillation or isothermal distillation procedures, such as the Conway micro-diffusion method [1], developed some forty years ago, which are much less efficient and consume much more sample and reagent. 

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