Qualitative Analysis of Catalytic Reaction Products using msFineAnalysis AI - Upcycling of Discarded Polystyrene
General
Recently, attention is increasingly focused on upcycling of discarded plastic products to create a chemical product of higher quality or value than the original. To elevate chemical upcycling using catalytic reaction to an economically viable level, accurate analysis of reaction products is essential. While gas chromatography - mass spectrometry (GC-MS) is commonly used to determine reaction products, typical database search based on GC-MS often fails to fully identify these products.
JEOL’s GC-high resolution mass spectrometer (GC-HRMS), JMS-T2000GC, is capable of: 1) high precision mass analysis; 2) detection of molecular and fragment ions through electron ionization (EI) and soft ionization (SI); and 3) auto analysis of acquired data by msFineAnalysis AI to determine chemical formulas and predict chemical structures. These features make it possible to determine chemical structures of such components that conventional GC-MS is unable to.
In this work, we reacted discarded polystyrene using a catalyst, which is a known upcycling technique[1], and qualitatively analyzed the resulting products in a JMS-T2000GC and msFineAnalysis AI.