Chromatography Forum

Hi,

I am trying to determine the alcohol % in different hand sanitizers and running into some issues with gel matrix. The results I am getting are about half of what I am expecting. I am following USP <611> alcohol determination for my sample prep which is:

Dilute sample to ~2% sample concentration in water.

Even though alcohol is soluble in water, will I need to switch to a different solvent in order to extract all the ethanol.

Any help very much appreciated.

As I posted in your other topic, our alcohol-containing products were hand sanitizer gels; we always used water as the solvent, and had no issues with our assay. We also cGMP-validated the USP procedure, adapted for our gel finished product, our pointy-haired boss demanded that.

Production QC also had no issues with the procedure.

There were some potentially proprietary sample preparation innovations we developed to aid in the analysis of a volatile analyte accurately. One involved weighing 3 gram sample into a volumetric flask already containing about 50 ml water.