Determination of individual homologues and total content of benzalkonium chloride by reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography using a short butyl column.

摘要

Benzalkonium chloride (a mixture of alkylbenzyldimethylammonium chlorides that usually contains C-10, C-12, C-14 and C-16 homologues), commonly known as BKC, is used as a bacteriostatic agent in many household, food and drug products. A simple, rapid, robust and stability-indicating reversed-phase HPLC method is described using a short butyl (C4) column for the simultaneous determination of each individual homologue content, as well as the total concn. of individual homologues in commercial bulk raw material batches of BKC samples. Chromatographic separation was performed on a 5 cm ACE C4 column with mobile phase consisting of water, acetonitrile and KCl. Even though using a short column can potentially cause some challenges to resolving certain critical pairs of peaks, the technique successfully separated all of the analyte peaks (including those from stressed, degraded products) on a short column using an optimal mobile phase.