ASTM E800 Guide for Measurement of Gases Present or Generated During Fires
12. Analytical Methods Capable of Simultaneous Determination of a Wide Range of Gases
12.1 General Comments - With a steady increase in the number of gases deemed important to track for characterizing combustion gas toxicity, techniques geared towards analyzing each gas separately can become unwieldy or impractical. Simultaneous determination of concentrations of a large number of gases can be done by molecular spectroscopy, specifically, by infrared or mass spectrometric techniques. Developement efforts in recent years have generally focused on infrared, specifically Fourier-Transform InfraRed (FTIR), techniques. The general principles of this application have been described by Nyden and Babrauskas (98). Experimental techniques and results have been reported by Kallonen (99). A NORDTEST standard has been published which gives the details of conducting such FTIR analyses (100). The FTIR method is suitable for monitoring most unsymmetric molecules that have a resonably large infrared molecular absorbance. In practice, this means that the technique is suitable for most gas species of interest in conbustion studies with the exception of O2 and H2S.
