A systematic approach to thermal conductivity detector design I. Use of computer-aided data acquisition for the evaluation of cell contributions to peak shape.

The design of thermal conductivity detectors for open tubular gas chromatography was systematically investigated with the aid of modern digital data acquisition techniques. Two important factors in such a design are sensitivity and peak broadening. The latter factor was the principle thrust of this work and contributions to peak shape from both cell design and volume were analyzed by the method of statistical moments. Peak variance (the mean square displacement along the x-axis of a chromatographic peak) was shown to correlate directly with cell volume in cells of the same design but both variance and asymmetry were found to be design dependent.