ABSTRACT
Combustion of organic material plays a predominant role in modern indus try and modern life (energy plants, production procedures, waste incinera tion, private heating, motorized vehicles). On the other hand, it is a major emission source of hazardous organic pollutants with considerable impact on human and ecosystem health (see Chapter 24). A reduction of these combustion effluents is possible by either gas cleaning measures (catalytic converters in motor cars, gas cleaning plants in industrial incinerators) or by optimization of combustion processes (e.g. new technologies of combined gasification/combustion for industrial waste incinerators, new concepts of combustion engines, or fast online control of combustion processes). For the development of any of these new technologies, appropriate analytical tools for monitoring organic combustion effluents are necessary, which are fast enough for online control, sensitive enough for trace analysis, and selective enough for detection of trace species within highly complicated mixtures of chemical compounds. Conventional analytical methods are not able to fulfill these requirements simultaneously.
