Technical Cleanliness analysis by Pyr-GC/MS method-performance study

Technical Cleanliness (TC) as a parameter of industrial products requires companies to define and control cleanliness of their finished goods and production premises. Besides well-established methods recommended in VDA 19 and ISO 16232 standards, the Pyr-GC/MS method can also be effectively applied for cleanliness analysis. In this paper we have investigated performance of Pyr-GC/MS method in terms of the size of particulate contaminant(s) possible to be reliably identified by this method. This parameter, better known as Limit of Detection (LOD), is crucial for expressing limitations of Pyr-GC/MS technique and for comparing it to other methods currently applied to TC analysis. The PVC polymer was chosen for its good solubility in THF creating solutions which provided control over amount of sample introduced for Pyr-GC/MS measurement(s). From the studied solutions, the 0.5 ng LOD was reached as a result reliable for TC analysis, which corresponds to 8.8 µm (spherical)particle size.