Title:Speciation Study of Trialkyl- and Triphenyl- Tin by Liquid Chromatography Using Ion Trap TOF Tandem MS and Atmospheric Pressure Chemical Ionization
VOLUME: 9 ISSUE: 2
Author(s):N. M. Tzollas, G. A. Zachariadis and E. Rosenberg
Affiliation:Lab. of Analytical Chemistry, Dept. of Chemistry, Aristotle University, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece.
Keywords:HPLC, TOF-MS, triorgano-tin, speciation, tripropyltin, tributyltin, tripentyltin, triphenyltin
Abstract:In this work, the capability of a hybrid tandem technique of LCMS-IT-TOF was examined for speciation of
tripropyltin (TPrT), tributyltin (TBT), tripentyltin (TPeT) and triphenyltin (TPhT) and a relatively fast and accurate
method was developed for their determination in aqueous solutions. In this context, several chromatographic parameters
were studied such as chromatographic column, mobile phase, flow rate and gradient program in order to optimise the
separation of the above species. Optimum separation was achieved using reverse phase C18 bonded-silica column. The
mobile phase consisted of water and methanol and acetic acid at a total flow rate of 0.4 mL min–1 and the separation was
completed in less than 8 min. Determination of the analytes was performed based on the signal of characteristic ions for
each particular triorgano-tin compound. The detection limits of the set of the above four triorgano-tin species were ranged
between 13 – 45 pg as absolute mass of Sn injected into the column and the relative standard deviation was ranged between
4.3 – 9.9 %. Finally, the performance characteristics of the method were compared to those reported in literature using
similar tandem LC-MS techniques.
