Rapid and Simultaneous Determination of Acetone, Butanol and Ethanol in Butanol Fermentation Broth by Full Evaporation Headspace Gas Chromatography

A gas chromatography (GC) method including a full evaporation headspace (FE-HS) sampling technique was developed for rapidly and simultaneously measuring volatile products for acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) fermentation. In this method, a small volume (<50 μL) of fermentation broth was directly injected into a sealed headspace sample vial (22 mL) and the mass transfer of acetone-butanol-ethanol from liquid phase to vapor phase achieved equilibration at 105 °C for 5 min, the vaporous solvents were then determined by GC with a flame ionization detector. The results showed that the measurement precision and accuracy were excellent with present method, in which the relative standard deviations (RSD) of ethanol, acetone and butanol were of 1.7%, 1.2% and 0.76%, and their recovery was of 99.7±2.68%, 100±1.78% and 99.6±1.74%, respectively. The present method is simple, practical, automated, and suitable for application in the fermentation in related researches without any sample pretreatment.