The image that comes to mind when you hear gas chromatography (GC) would probably not resemble a lunchbox-sized apparatus. Yet researchers from the University of Michigan created a portable GC that’s very light-weight and efficient.

When analysing vapours, there’s a few ways to go about it, but the gold standard for gas phase detection is gas chromatography (GC) coupled with mass spectrometry. However, you need complex and very expensive machines to do these analyses. ‘That’s why we develop GC that is portable, small, light-weight and a lot cheaper while not diminishing the performance’, says Xudong (Sherman) Fan, professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan. Currently, ‘portable’ GC’s weigh in at around 15-30 kg, but Fan’s version is no more than 4 kg.