Separation and determination of estrogen in the water environment by high performance liquid chromatography-fourier transform infrared spectroscopy

The components for connecting high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) were investigated to determine estrogen in the water environment, including heating for atomization, solvent removal, sample deposition, drive control, spectrum collection, chip swap, cleaning and drying. Results showed that when the atomization temperature was increased to 388 K, the interference of mobile phase components (methanol, H2O, acetonitrile, and NaH2PO4) were completely removed in the IR measurement of estrogen, with 0.999 of similarity between IR spectra obtained after separation and corresponding to the standard IR spectra. In experiments with varying HPLC injection volumes, high similarity for IR spectra was obtained at 20 ul injection volume at 0.01 mg/L BPA while a useful IR spectrum for 10 ng/L BPA was obtained at 80 ul injection volume. In addition, estrogen concentrations in the natural water samples were calculated semi-quantitatively from the peak intensities of IR spectrum in the mid-infrared region.