A direct high-performance liquid chromatographic method for the determination of therminol 66 contamination in commercial glycerin and fatty acids

A simple and sensitive high-performance liquid chromatographic method for the determination of Therminol 66 thermal heating fluid in glycerin and fatty acids is developed. Sample solutions dissolved in methanol-tetrahydrofuran (50:50, v/v) are injected directly into a reversed-phase C18 column and eluted with a methanol and water mixture (88:12, v/v). The concentration of the thermal heating fluid is monitored by fluorescence detection at 257 nm (excitation) and 320 nm (emission). The calibration graph obtained from various concentrations of the thermal heating fluid in the methanol and tetrahydrofuran mixture is linear (correlation coefficient = 0.999), and the limit of detection is 0.01 microg/mL. Spiked glycerin containing 0.1 to 1.0 microg/g of the thermal heating fluid also gives good linearity with a mean recovery of 95.3%. The mean intra- and interassay precision are 1.80-6.51% and 5.71-9.03%, respectively, at the 0.1-microg/g level. The method is simple and does not require any pretreatment step, thus it is ideal for quality assurance purposes.