Simultaneous detection of monoethanolamine, diethanolamine, and triethanolamine by HPLC with a chemiluminescence reaction and online derivatization to tertiary amine.

In this paper we propose a new postcolumn detection method for compounds having primary, secondary, and tertiary amine moieties. The primary and secondary amine are delivatized by a reaction with epichlorohydrin having an epoxy moiety in a reaction coil to yield a tertiary amine with subsequent chemiluminescence detection using [Ru(bpy)3]3+. The liner values of the calibration curves of monoethanolamine (MEA), diethanolamine (DEA) and triethanolamine (TEA) were 0.02 - 1.0 nmol (r2 = 0.9986), 0.02 - 0.5 nmol (r2 = 0.9993) and 0.1 - 1.0 nmol (r2 = 0.9482), respectively. Also, the detection limits (S/N = 3) of MEA, DEA and TEA were 30, 25 and 40 pmol, respectively. The amount of DEA and TEA in shaving cream (60 microg/20 microL) were found to be 0.3 nmol and 14 nmol, respectively, by the proposed method.