ABSTRACT
Thermal desorption has a wide range of environmental applications, from monitoring personal exposure to toxic chemicals in the workplace to ambient and indoor air quality monitoring and to the determination of volatiles in soil and water matrices. Vaporization is the conversion process by which a chemical in solid or liquid form is changed to the gas state by heating or reducing pressure. The thermal stability of an organic molecule is a combination of its thermodynamic and kinetic stabilities. Thermal conditions can also be selected to evolve nonvolatile and insoluble organic compounds as their pyrolysis products, and the parent compound identities are inferred from their thermal degradation products as in the application of pyrolysis Gas chromatography for the determination of rubbers and plastics. Solvent extraction followed by Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry analysis has been the most widely used approach for carbonaceous materials collected from sample matrices.
