Agilent Technologies Europe has announced the release of an application note titled 'Retention Time Locked GC/MS Analysis of Phenols', publication number 5988-3934EN
The note describes gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) methods for more than 50 phenols and their common internal standards.
All the phenols and their internal standards used in the US EPA methods are listed, including the recent 528 method.
A number of phenols not found in any method are included to offer analysts an opportunity for more complete characterisation of phenols and to avoid misidentification.
Retention time locking makes the phenol retention times universal, so that any analyst using an Agilent 6890 Plus gas chromatograph and 5973N mass selective detector can permanently reproduce the retention times of every listed phenol, so that the retention times remain unchanged with typical column maintenance, such as column trimming or replacement.
These properties are particularly useful in making definitive assignments of phenol identification from among the many possible isomers that may be present but may not be on hand in the laboratory standards.
Both high-resolution and 'fast quant' methods were developed for DB-XLB and DB-5ms columns.
The high-resolution programs have analysis times of 31 and 21 minutes while the 'fast quant' runtimes are 16 and 14 minutes for DB-XLB and DB-5ms columns, respectively.
The 'fast quant' methods are particularly useful when surveying and quantitating a limited number of compounds.
The significantly reduced runtimes are quite attractive for rapid, target compound analysis.
"Retention Time Locked GC/MS Analysis of Phenols" is available without charge from any Agilent sales office or Agilent's web site.
