Volatile fatty acids leachable from pharmaceutical and food & beverage packaging

[The_Ion_Lady]

As there have been a few conferences on Extractables and Leachables, I have had a few questions sent my way. In fact, they are related to packaging to both Pharma and Food & Beverage, it also related to waste water treatment. This is looking at volatile fatty acids, which are ideal by ion chromatography. There are various anion columns I would recommend:

• Thermo Scientific Dionex IonPac AS11-HC-4µm, this is a good starting point for a larger range of the volatile fatty acids and it's a high capacity column
• Thermo Scientific Dionex IonPac AS28-Fast-4µm, this is a shorter fast column so less capacity but can cover a good range
• Thermo Scientific Dionex IonPac AS15, is very good for resolving small chain volatile fatty acids but not so good if there are more than 5 carbons
• Thermo Scientific Dionex IonPac AS19-4µm, has good capacity and very good for the separation of the larger volatile fatty acids

Obviously, those are my choices with hydroxide as eluent. They would be good with a mass spec, even a single quad just to confirm the acid. The acids that can leach out from packaging can dissolve or absorb into water for analysis, whether it can form other toxic impurities or it can spoil or degrade the product, can be detected by conductivity easily.

Are you interested in this topic?