Determination of Ethanol Content in and Simple Fail/Pass Judgment of Alcohol Hand Sanitizer by FTIR

Introduction

The effects of alcohol-based hand sanitizers are dependent on type of alcohol used and alcohol concentration. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended sanitizers with 60 - 95% alcohol as the most effective composition of hand sanitizers. Ethanol, which has bactericidal activity, is prepared at the optimal concentration level for a range of commercially available alcohol-based sanitizers. To measure alcohol concentration, the distillation method or gas chromatography (GC) is stipulated by the United States Pharmacopeia (USP). These methods require more than 20 minutes per sample for analysis. Pretreatment, such as dilution, is also required. In contrast, if the Fourier transform infrared spectrophotometer (FTIR) is used, the preparatory steps can be skipped and the ethanol content in alcohol sanitizers can quickly be determined in approximately one minute. This report introduces a simple pass/fail judgment of ethanol concentration in a commercially available ethanol sanitizer using the photometric measurement function that comes as standard in LabSolutions^TM IR.

November 20, 2020 GMT