Identification and distribution analysis of additives in a molded nitrile rubber (NBR) by PY/GCxGC/HRTOFMS
MSTips No. 289
The characteristics of polymeric materials vary depending on the additives. Consequently, a variety of additives can be added into the raw polymer resin in order to achieve the required characteristics for the product. GC/MS combined with pyrolyzer system (PY/GC/MS) is used as typical analytical method for polymeric material. However PY/GC/MS is often insufficient chromatographic separation of additives and thermal decomposition compounds. And sometimes it is difficult to assign compound identities because of poor chromatographic separation. The comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography/high resolution time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GCxGC/HRTOFMS) is known as the technique that can be take high chromatographic separation by two different polarity GC columns and can be take accurate mass measurements used to estimate elemental compositions. It means that the GCxGC/HRTOFMS combined with PY system has a possibility to take the more detail and accurate information about polymeric materials than conventional PY/GC/MS system.
In this application note, we identified the additives and their distribution within a commercially available molded polymer by using GCxGC/HRTOFMS with pyrolysis (PY/GCxGC/HRTOFMS).