Development of an Innovative Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry Method for Assessment of Formaldehyde in the Workplace Atmosphere

摘要

World consumption of formaldehyde (FA) is forecast to grow at an average annual rate of about 4% from 2015 to 2020 with world production to exceed 52 million tons in 2017. From the first day of January 2016, the Commission Regulation No. 91/2015 established the FA classification through an indication from European Chemical Agency as category 2 mutagenic and category 1B carcinogen. A novel method for the determination of gaseous FA in air is presented herewith. The sampling was carried out using a miniaturized cartridge by means of a medium-flow pumping system (1.0 L min(-1), 5-60 min) and absorption of FA vapors on 2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazine. Cartridge desorption removing the excess derivatizing agent based upon solid-phase extraction was performed by an innovative xyz robotic system on-line with fast gas chromatography (GC)-mass spectrometry (MS). Through the generation of standard atmospheres of known concentration of FA, we evaluated the precision (relative standard deviation for n = 10, 8.8%), lower limit of quantification (0.072 mu g/cartridge), and linearity (from 0.125-64 mu g/cartridge with correlation coefficient of 0.99) of the method. The described procedure combines the efficiency of fast GC-MS systems with both the high throughput of autosampler and the quantitative accuracy of FA-dinitrophenylhydrazone for measuring American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists TLV Ceiling.