Isomers identification of pyrolysis products of polymers by pyrolysis GC/MS/MS
Introduction
GC/MS has the ability to analyze components in complex samples with high sensitivity. In particular, the EI method is effective for the analysis of pyrolysis products of polymers because it can generate fragment ions containing a large amount of structural information. On the other hand, GC/MS/MS shows high performance in the detection of trace components co-eluted with matrices and in the identification of isomers. Especially, for isomer identification, by selecting fragment ions useful for structural analysis and performing MS/MS measurements, it is possible to confirm from which part of the structure the selected ions originate. For example, structural isomers of ASS, SSA and SAS, which are copolymers of acrylate (A) and styrene (S) are observed in the pyrolysis GC/MS of ABS resin. These are components not registered in the NIST library, and their complexity makes it difficult to decipher structural information from the mass spectra obtained by single-scan measurement. However, it is possible to advance the structural analysis of these structural isomers by using MS/MS measurement. In this application note, we report the identification of structural isomers of ASS, SSA and SAS observed from the pyrolysis of ABS resin using product ion scan measurement with the GC triple quadrupole mass spectrometer JMS-TQ4000GC (Figure 1).