Abstract
It is well known that surfactants increase the solubility of hydrophobic organic compounds and cause adverse environmental effects. The removal of these compounds from the contaminated soil or ground-water is particularly difficult due to their water soluble feature. In this work, an ultra-high performance hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatographic method was developed for the separation of oligomers of Triton X-100 octylphenol-polyethoxylate non-ionic surfactant. Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) was used to identify the Triton X-100 compounds. There was a 44 mass unit difference between two adjacent peaks that is the molar mass of one ethylene oxide group (–CHCHO–). A quadratic retention model was applied for the estimation of retention of the examined non-ionic surfactant and the optimization of gradient elution conditions. The optimized method was suitable for the baseline separation of 28 Triton X-100 oligomers in five minutes.
Highlights
Surfactants have a wide range of applications as detergents, emulsifiers, wetting agents or dispersing agents and in households as personal-care products, cleaning products, plastics, paints, resins and pesticides [1,2]
Taking the m/z ratio, isotopic peak and molecular structure into account, we can conclude that a sodium ion binds to the hydrophilic polyethylene oxide group ([M + Na]+ )
This phenomena is common in Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) separations because glass containers may leach sodium contamination at very low concentrations
Summary
Surfactants have a wide range of applications as detergents, emulsifiers, wetting agents or dispersing agents and in households as personal-care products, cleaning products, plastics, paints, resins and pesticides [1,2]. They increase the solubility of environmentally dangerous materials (e.g., polyaromatic hydrocarbons, pesticides) and keep them in solutions. (TX) is an octylphenol polyethoxylate, a member of the group of the non-ionic detergents.
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