2. Water samples are likely to contain trace amounts of other organic compounds, many of which will extract into pentane along with the trihalomethanes. A shormethod, generally does not do a particularly good job of resolving chromatographic peaks. Why do we not need to worry about these other compounds?
An electron capture detector responds only to compounds, such as
the trihalomethanes, that have electronegative functional groups. Because an electron capture detector will not respond to most of the potential interfering compounds, the chromatogram will have relatively few peaks other than those for the trihalomethanes and the internal standard.t, packed column, such as the one used in this