Capillary electrochromatography-mass spectrometry of nonionic surfactants

ANYL 86

Dean Norton, Dnntn22@aol.com and Shahab A. Shamsi, chesas@langate.gsu.edu. Department of Chemistry, Center of Biotechnology and Drug Design, Georgia State University, P.O. Box 4098, Atlanta, GA 30302-4098
The Triton X-Series are alkylphenyl polyether type nonionic surfactants of varying polyoxyethylene chain length where the X value represents the average number of ethylene oxide units in the ether side chain. Applications include industrial and household detergent formulations as well as emulsifying agents. Capillary electrochromatography-electrospray ionization-mass spectrometry (CEC-ESI-MS) offers several unique advantages over the traditional hyphenation methods based on GC-MS and HPLC–MS. For example, several advantages of CEC-MS over HPLC-MS include higher plate numbers (N) attainable in CEC-MS, as well as more compatible flow rate (sub-micro liter) when coupled to ESI-MS, and less consumption of toxic organic solvents. In this work, different CEC-ESI-MS parameters such as mobile phase composition, sheath liquid and spray chamber parameters were optimized to provide suitable and sensitive analysis of short to medium chain length (e.g., X=1-17) Triton X-Series nonionic surfactants. However, the challenging analysis of longer chain surfactants (e.g., X>17) is currently underway.
 

General Session
7:00 PM-9:00 PM, Sunday, 26 March 2006 Georgia World Congress Center -- Ex. Hall B4, Poster

Division of Analytical Chemistry

The 231st ACS National Meeting, Atlanta, GA, March 26-30, 2006