Gareth M. Roberts

Many volatile organic compounds (VOCs) found in a variety of consumer products are potentially harmful to human health and the environment. Within industry, to regulate product safety and quality, methods for measuring specific VOCs in a product, typically by thermal desorption gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (TD-GC–MS), are implemented. Such analysis provides a comprehensive VOC profile. However, the nature of some products, such as food, can be chemically complex. Within this complexity, trace-level or coeluting compounds can be difficult or time-consuming to identify. As a potential solution, new software tools are being developed to automate interpretation of the data.