Fig. 2.

Reproducibility of PDMS patch volatile organic compound sampling and TD-GC–MS analysis. The 1-Pentanol internal standard showed a highly reproducible response (based upon the peak area in single ion monitoring mode) indicating excellent robustness in terms of both the PDMS patch sampling method (technical reproducibility) and the TD-GC–MS systems analytical reproducibility. Thus, high confidence was given with respect to the simple sampling method that PDMS patch ambient absorption of VOCs provides, so much so that normalisation of each sample to their respective internal standard response was not deemed necessary.