Chromatography Forum

Greetings Fellow Chemists,
Has anyone ever performed an analysis of tetraethy lead by the use of GC-ICP-MS. Tetraethyl lead, as you know, was a fuel additive that was banned several years ago. There are no current methods which are around that anylze specifically for TEL in an environmental or biological matricies. I'd figured that there are a few research groups that are doing organometalic analysis by GC-ICP-MS. The reason which I post this topic is that a regulatory agency (DEC) requested TEL analysis at an old fuel undeground storage tank leak that occured 20 years ago that my firm that I work for might get involved with. My responce to the agency was that there are only methods to test for total lead by ICP-MS. So, if anyone was doing this analysis, I would be quite interested in how you are performing it.

Best Regards,
Alex

I am doing this analysis by using GC-ICP-MS. If you are interested, please contact me.

GC-ICP-MS seems a bit of overkill if you ask me. First, TEL has a good spectrum and it is volatile enough that you should be able to easily do this by GC-MS in a standard environmental laboratory. You can also explore the DET detector that has a great deal of specificity for this compound and run it by standard GC. Contact Paul Patterson at DET for more information on the analysis of TEL by GC, he should be able to help you.

Best regards.