Analysis of Volatile Hazardous Air Pollutants and Ozone Precursors Using the Cryofocusing GC-MS/MS (MRM) Method

Environmental monitoring of volatile organic compounds in the atmosphere has been carried out for the purposes of understanding the health effects and inferring the sources of photochemical ozone and PM2.5 particulates. Multi-component simultaneous analysis using a canister -based by GC/MS (SIM mode) is widely used as an analytical method for these purposes. With the GC/MS (SIM) method, increasing the number of substances subject to measurement can make analysis difficult due to interference among the substances being analyzed or with contaminants. The MRM method has excellent selectivity and is used as an alternative method to the SIM method, but the number of reports about its application to volatile organic compound analysis is limited.
In this paper, we developed a simultaneous analysis method using a GC/MS/MS (MRM) method for 51 kinds of substances classified as hazardous air pollutants and 55 kinds of photoozone precursors (10 kinds belong to both categories, so 96 kinds) and reported the results of its application to the analysis of environmental samples.