Development of new-type rapid analysis technology of polychlorinated biphenyls by using liquid chromatographic clean-up material (polyvinyl alcohol gel)

We developed a new-type rapid polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) analysis technology on the basis of a liquid chromatographic clean-up system combined with a large-volume injection GC–LRMS. Among 18 kinds of materials such as polymer gels, normal-phase silica gels, reversed-phase silica gels, carbon material and ion-exchange material, polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) gel and poly (hydroxylmethacrylate) gel were found to give rather good separation performance for insulating oil. Especially, PVA gel was confirmed to be the most suitable for rapid PCB analysis because of its least required quantity of fraction liquid as well as the highest resolution. Then, we confirmed elution characteristics of all PCB isomers and removal efficiency of insulating oil on PVA gel under an optimized condition, and established high-performance clean-up system using a combination of octadecyl silica gel (ODS), porous graphite carbon (PGC) and PVA gel. In this system, we applied newly valve-switching method that could remove other impurities. In addition, it was demonstrated that the proposed clean-up system could become highly sensitive and rapid PCB analysis technology with 2-h analysis time, lower measurement limit of less than 0.05 mg/kg, and a variation coefficient of less than 5%, by coupling with a large-volume injection type GC–LRMS. Thus, we can conclude that this rapid PCB analysis technology has not only good correlativity (R2 > 0.999) with standard analysis method but also high durability and can be fully applied to actual PCB-treatment plants.