Abstract:The traditional solvent extraction-GC/MS method for analyzing hydrocarbon compounds in aerosols is improved by coupling Curie-point pyrolysis and GC/MS (CPP-GC/MS). The best conditions for the new method are using foil of 445℃, holding 60s for heating, and 30psi pulse splitless injection for GC/MS. For this new method, the detection limits are 0.04~0.08ng for C16~C26 alkanes, 0.1~0.5ng for C27~C34 alkanes, 0.01~0.1ng for PAHs, 0.08ng for hopanes. Relative standard deviations (RSD) are 2.1%~20.6% for standards and 3.6%~21.3% for PM2.5 samples. 70% of the target compounds have calibration curves with linear regression (R2) of over 0.99. This study indicates that, the new method of CPP-GC/MS can effectively substitute the traditional method to analyze hydrocarbons in aerosols, and especially, it can be used to analyze low-loading aerosol samples, such as size-segregated samples for the study of aerosol size distribution.