Development and application of a method for the analysis of brominated flame retardants by fast gas chromatography with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometric detection

Abstract

The term brominated flame retardants (BFRs) refers to a class of compounds added during the manufacturing of some plastics to impede or even suppress the combustion process by depriving the flames of oxygen. Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) represent a group of compounds used in this capacity, and as a result of product emission/disposal, these structures have been found in both the environment and biota. In this work, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) coupled to gas chromatography (GC), in the form of fast gas chromatography, is explored as an option to shorten analysis times for the PBDEs with this element-specific detector; a run time of 10 min was ultimately established. The use of a new commercially available interface has been accomplished that has the requirement of heating the entire device at 325 °C in order to maintain the resolution between the species previously separated. The introduction of helium as an optional gas provides an increase in sensitivity; instrument detection limits within the low ppb level are demonstrated for all species examined. The precision, as relative standard deviation, does not exceed 7% for 5 manual injections. More rigorous control of the interface temperature seems to be required for analyzing the species with more than six bromine atoms per molecule. The method is applied to the analysis of sewage sludge samples obtained from the Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati and the presence of three of the most abundant PBDEs has been observed (BDE-47, BDE-99 and BDE-100).