Ruggedness testing of gas chromatographic method for residual solvents in pharmaceutical substances

Abstract

Ruggedness testing is performed on a gas chromatographic method for the quantitative determination of residual solvents in steroids. Eight experimental variables or factors which were expected to influence the quantitative results were selected. These factors were divided into two independent groups, i.e. four factors related to the injection process and four factors related to separation and detection. In order to determine interaction between factors and quadratic effects, a central composite design was selected for the set-up of the experiments. Because in the method an internal standard is used, relative peak area was used as response. A deviation of up to 2.5% per factor for the quantitative results was regarded as acceptable. Other responses studied are related to the system suitability. Observed main, quadratic and interaction effects were translated into rugged intervals of the experimental variables by graphical presentation. It was found that besides main effects significant interaction effects were present, for example between the temperature of the injector and the split-flow. Interaction effects can easily result in the reduction of the rugged intervals by a factor of 2. The calculated rugged intervals were compared with the precision of the instrument or factor settings in order to estimate the ruggedness of the factors. Eventually, the maximum effect of the variation in the instrument settings on the quantitative results regarding the precision of the factor settings was found to be only 2.2%. Overall, the method proved to be rugged for most factors, except for the split-flow of the injector for which the method was only rugged to a limited extent.