Abstract:

A method for the simultaneous determination of 15 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in cigarette filter was developed by isotope internal standard combined with gas chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. The cigarette filters were extracted with dichloromethane, and the extract was filtered with 0.22 μm organic phase membrane. The samples were isolated by DB-5MS column (30 m×0.25 mm, 0.25 μm) and detected using multiple reaction monitoring mode of electron impact source under positive ion mode. The linearities of the 15 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (acenapthylene, acenaphthene, fluorene, phenanthrene, anthracene, fluoranthene, pyrene, ben[a]anthracene, chrysene, benzo[b]fluoranthene, benzo[k]fluoranthene, benzo[a]pyrene, dibenzo[a,h]anthracene, benzo[g,h,i]perylene and indeno[1,2,3-c,d]pyrene) were good, and the correlation coefficients (R²) ranged from 0.9914 to 0.9999. The average recoveries of the 15 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons were 81.6%-109.6% at low, middle and high spiked levels, and the relative standard deviations were less than 16%, except that the relative standard deviation of fluorene at the low spiked level was 19.2%. The limits of detection of the 15 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons were 0.02 to 0.24 ng/filter, and the limits of quantification were 0.04 to 0.80 ng/filter. The method is simple, rapid, accurate, sensitive and reproducible. It is suitable for the quantitative analysis of the 15 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in cigarette filters.

Key words: cigarette, filter, gas chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (GC-MS/MS), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)