Migration kinetics of primary aromatic amines from polyamide kitchenware: Easy and fast screening procedure using fluorescence

Abstract

Primary aromatic amines, PAAs, and their derivatives constitute a health risk and control of their migration from food contact materials is the subject of permanent attention by the authorities. 25.1% of notifications made by Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed in the European Union between 2010 and 2015 concerned PAAs, polyamide cooking utensils being a common source. It is thus useful to have fast and efficient analytical methods for their control.In this work a non-separative, easy, fast and inexpensive spectrofluorimetric method based on the second order calibration of excitation-emission fluorescence matrices (EEMs) was proposed for the determination of aniline (ANL), 2,4-diaminotoluene (2,4-TDA) and 4,4′-methylenedianiline (4,4′-MDA) in polyamide cooking utensils. The procedure made it possible to identify unequivocally each analyte. Trilinearity of the data tensor guarantees the uniqueness of the solution obtained through parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC), so the factors of the decomposition match up with the analytes. The three analytes were unequivocally identified by the correlation between the pure spectra and the PARAFAC excitation and emission spectral loadings. The recovery percentages found were, 82.6%, 112.7% and 84.4% for ANL, 2,4-TDA and 4,4′-MDA respectively. The proposed method was applied to carry out a migration test from polyamide cooking utensils, using a 3% (w/v) acetic acid in aqueous solution as food simulant. Detectable levels of 4,4′-MDA were found in food simulant from some of the investigated cooking utensils. Finally, a kinetic model for the migration of 4,4′-MDA has been fitted to experimental data obtained in the migration test. Thanks to the selectivity of PARAFAC calibration, which greatly simplifies sample treatment avoiding the use of toxic solvents, the developed method follows most green analytical chemistry principles.