Simultaneous determination of phenolic antioxidants in edible vegetable oils by HPLC–FLD assisted with second-order calibration based on ATLD algorithm

• The extraction is unnecessary and a column washing is also not required.
• Different kinds of oils can be analysed with the same chromatographic conditions.
• Ten synthetic phenolic antioxidants (SPAs) can be eluted within 6 min.
• Baseline drift and peak overlapping were successfully resolved by our method.
• Low detection limits are rapidly achieved with minimal organic reagents.

A novel strategy that combines the chemometrics method with high performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence detector (HPLC–FLD) was developed for the simultaneous determination of seven phenolic antioxidants in six kinds of oil samples. After a simple dilution step, oil samples can be directly injected into the detecting system and the data were measured in a short time with a chromatographic system operating in the gradient elution mode. Since the chromatographic and spectral peaks among interesting analytes and interferences were heavily overlapped, second-order calibration method based on alternating trilinear decomposition (ATLD) algorithm which fully exploiting the second-order advantage was adopted. Successful resolution was obtained in the presence of different matrix interferences in different oil samples, and the developed approach allows the quantification of the antioxidants at levels found in edible vegetable oils, without the necessity of applying either preconcentration or extraction steps, moreover, a column washing is also not required. Meanwhile, the effectiveness and reproducibility of the proposed method were also validated by some statistical parameters like root mean squared error of prediction (RMSEP), limits of detection (LOD) and relative standard deviation (RSD). Then the proposed method was compared with several commonly selected methods in sample preparation, elution time and LOD.