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Quantitative and discriminative analysis of carnauba waxes by reactive pyrolysis-GC in the presence of organic alkali using a vertical microfurnace pyrolyzer

2001; Elsevier BV; Volume: 58-59; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s0165-2370(00)00155-8

1873-250X

Lili Wang, Shino Ando, Yasuyuki Ishida, Hajime Ohtani, Shin Tsuge, Toshihiro Nakayama,

Meat and Animal Product Quality

Reactive pyrolysis gas chromatography (reactive Py-GC) using a vertical microfurnace pyrolyzer was applied to quantitative and discriminative analysis of carnauba waxes. Pyrolysis of the wax samples in the presence of an organic alkali, tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH) allowed almost quantitative recoveries of their constituents including long chain fatty acids, hydroxy acids, higher alcohols and diols, and cinnamic acids as well-resolved peaks on the resulting pyrograms. On the basis of the relative intensities of these peaks, chemical composition of the carnauba waxes was determined with less than 2% relative standard deviations without using any tedious sample pretreatment. Furthermore, discrimination of the carnauba waxes collected from the leaves at two different growing stages was achieved by use of the principal component analysis carried out on the basis of chemical composition of the waxes obtained by reactive Py-GC.