Determination of benzoic acid in soft drinks by gas chromatography with on-line pyrolytic methylation technique

A new application of pyrolytic methylation was developed to determine benzoic acid in soft drinks by gas chromatography (GC) without using any pretreatment procedures and special pyrolyzer. With the on-line pyrolytic methylation by tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH), benzoic acid was converted into its corresponding methyl ester in the injector at 280 °C. Thus, samples containing benzoic acid could be well determined by direct-injection in GC on the medium polar stationary phase column. To obtain optimum methylation conditions, important factors were investigated and then applied to the following experiments. The results were obtained as following: 280 °C as reaction temperature, 2:1 as the proportion of TMAH to benzoic acid. The storage time of mixed solution had no obvious effect on the area of benzoic acid methyl ester peak. With the p-xylene as an inter-standard, GC behaviors were investigated under these optimum conditions. The linear range achieved for benzoic acid was 1-10,000 mg/l with the correlation coefficient of 0.9985. The precision was quite high with the R.S.D. of 2.8% and the limit of detection reached 0.1 mg/l. The potential of the proposed method was assessed by applying it to the determination of benzoic acid in soft drinks. The results obtained coincided with the statement on the labels and all of the detected data were below the maximum permitted concentration of the European Union Legislation. This on-line pyrolytic methylation technique was proved to be simple to implement, sensitive and selective.