napthalene in honey

[burak]

hi;
I'am a food engineer in turkey.We have got gcms in our labrotary and we want to do napthalane analysis in honey at gcms but we haven't got a specific method somebody help us thanks...

[sepscientologist]

Do you have a column? Napthalene standard? First make a method for naphthalene in some low boiling solvent.
Then try spiking a known amount of napthalene into honey and see if you can find a good solvent to extract it
from the honey while not transferring any honey into the solvent (toluene?) Then see if you can extract any
naphthalene out of natural honey.

[sepscientologist]

also... this is liquid chromatography so you really should post not here but in the MS or GC section.

[tlahren]

For the extraction you may have to dissolve the honey in water a little so that it is easier to work with. I'm worried that the honey will just blob up in an organic solvent. An example and good place to start would be to use liquid/liquid extraction with hexane:

Spike 1g (or what ever sample size you want) with a known amount of Napthalene standard. Dissolve this in 100 mL of DI water. Extract with 20 mL of hexane three times for 2 minutes each in a separatory funnel. Wait about 10 minutes (or until emulsion is gone) between extractions. You should have about 60 mL of hexane extract now. Add a little anhydrous Na2SO4 to bind any water in the bottom. Evaporate the sample down to 1 mL and spike with an internal standard (I would use Napthalene-d10).

Obviously spiking napthalene in the beginning is only for initial method development to determine recovery. Alternatively you could use a surrogate standard at this step like 2-fluorobiphenyl or another deuterated PAH. This will help tell you your ability to recover napthalene during every sample analysis.