Determination Method for Mono- and Diethanolamine in Workplace Air by High-performance Liquid Chromatography

Determination Method for Mono- and Diethanolamine in Workplace Air by High-perfor- mance Liquid Chromatography: Akito TAKEUCHI, et al. Osaka Occupational Health Service Center, Japan Industrial Safety and Health Association—Objec- tives: The purpose of this research was to develop a simultaneous determination method for monoethanol- amine (MEA) and diethanolamine (DEA) in workplace air for risk assessment. Methods: The characteristics of the proposed method, such as recovery, quantitation limit, reproducibility and storage stability of the samples, were examined. Results: An air sampling cassette containing two sulfuric acid-treated glass fiber filters was chosen as the sampler. The MEA and DEA were extracted from the sampler filters, derivatized with 9- fluorenylmethyloxycarbonyl chloride and then analyzed by a high-performance liquid chromatograph equipped with a fluorescence detector or photo-diode array detec- tor. The overall recoveries from spiked samplers were 86-99 and 88-99% for MEA and DEA, respectively. The recovery after 5 days of storage in a refrigerator exceeded 95%. The overall limits of quantitation were 0.750 and 0.100 μg/sample for MEA and DEA, respec- tively. The relative standard deviations, which represent the overall reproducibility defined as precision, were 0.3-1.6 and 0.4-5.7% for MEA and DEA, respectively. Conclusions: The proposed method enables 4-h personal exposure monitoring of MEA and DEA at