High-temperature liquid chromatography inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry hyphenation for the combined organic and inorganic analysis of foodstuffs

Abstract

The coupling of a High-Temperature Liquid Chromatography system (HTLC) with an Inductively Coupled Plasma Atomic Emission Spectrometer (ICP-AES) is reported for the first time. This hyphenation combines the separation efficiency of HTLC with the detection power of a simultaneous ICP-AES system and allows the combined determination of organic compound and metals. The effluents of the column were introduced into the spectrometer and the chromatograms for organic compounds were obtained by plotting the carbon emission signal at a characteristic wavelength versus time. As regards metals, they were determined by injecting a small sample volume between the exit of the column and the spectrometer and taking the emission intensity for each one of the elements simultaneously. Provided that in HTLC the effluents emerged at high temperatures, an aerosol was easily generated at the exit of the column. Therefore, the use of a pneumatic nebulizer as a component of a liquid sample introduction system in the ICP-AES could be avoided, thus reducing the peak dispersion and limits of detection by a factor of two. The fact that a hot liquid stream was nebulized made it necessary to use a thermostated spray chamber so as to avoid the plasma cooling as a cause of the excessive mass of solvent delivered to it. Due to the similarity in sample introduction, an Evaporative Light Scattering Detector (ELSD) was taken as a reference. Comparatively speaking, limits of detection were of the same order for both HTLC-ICP-AES and HTLC-ELSD, although the latter provided better results for some compounds (from 10 to 20 mg L(-1) and 5-10 mg L(-1), respectively). In contrast, the dynamic range for the new hyphenation was about two orders of magnitude wider. More importantly, HTLC-ICP-AES provided information about the content of both organic (glucose, sucrose, maltose and lactose at concentrations from roughly 10 to 400 mg L(-1)) as well as inorganic (magnesium, calcium, sodium, zinc, potassium and boron at levels included within the 6-3000 mg L(-1)) species. The new development was applied to the analysis of several food samples such as milk, cream, candy, isotonic beverage and beer. Good correlation was found between the data obtained for the two detectors used (i.e., ICP-AES and ELSD).