DETERMINATION OF NITRATED PYRENES AND THEIR DERIVATIVES BY HIGH-PERFORMANCE LIQUID-CHROMATOGRAPHY WITH CHEMILUMINESCENCE DETECTION AFTER ONLINE ELECTROCHEMICAL REDUCTION

A sensitive and selective high performance liquid chromatographic method for the simultaneous determination of nitrated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and their reduced compounds has been developed. As the model compounds for the proposed method, pyrene, aminopyrene, nitrosopyrene, and several nitrated pyrenes were used. After separation on a reversed phase column, both nitropyrenes and nitrosopyrene which were not fluorescent, were electrochemically reduced to strongly fluorescent aminopyrenes, and detected chemilumigenically by using bis(2,4,6‐trichlorophenyl)oxalate and hydrogen peroxide as post column reagents. Their detection limits were all at the fmol levels, which were one or two orders lower than those by fluorescence detection. By the proposed method, nitropyrene, 1,3‐, and 1,8‐dinitropyrenes were detected in sooty emissions of cars after simple purifications. Copyright © 1990 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.