Jerry E. Cahill

Effects of permeation of helium through the walls of fused silica capillary GC columns

Hold-up times and peak widths have been measured in long fused silica GC capillary columns at high temperature with helium as the carrier gas. The results lead to the conclusion that the helium permeates through the column walls. The conventional Poiseuille theory of carrier gas flow has been extended to include this phenomenon. The resulting “loss modified Poiseuille” model, which uses literature values for the permeability of fused silica to helium, has been used to simulate the observed behavior. Good agreement between simulation and experiment validates the model. Simulations have been used to explore the effect of column permeability on hold-up times, peak widths, and velocity profiles over a broad range of column geometries.