EVALUATION OF GAS-CHROMATOGRAPHY FOURIER-TRANSFORM INFRARED-SPECTROSCOPY MASS-SPECTROMETRY FOR ANALYSIS OF PHENOLIC-COMPOUNDS

A gas chromatography (GC)-infrared (IR) spectroscopy-mass spectrometric (MS) system was evaluated for the identification and quantitation of 50 target phenolic compounds. Six columns of varying polarities were tested to achieve optimum chromatographic resolution of the phenolic compounds. The low polarity columns (HP-1, DB-5) gave resolution of 41 of the 50 phenolics; higher polarity columns (DB-17, DB-1701, DB-210, Nukol) were not as effective. Standard solutions containing 50 target phenolic compounds with concentrations in the range of 10 to 600 ng/mu-l were prepared. The solutions were injected into the selected column (HP-1) using cool on-column injection with a retention gap and with the IR detector and mass spectrometer run in the full scan mode. Fully resolved peaks could be easily identified and quantitated by either IR spectroscopy or MS. For co-eluting compounds spectral subtraction (IR) or selected ion (MS) techniques were employed as appropriate to identify the individual phenolics.