Capillary gas chromatographic analysis of highly brominated fire retardant compounds.

We report the development of a capillary gas chromatographic method, superior to existing packed column methods, for the analysis of decabromodiphenylether (I) and decabromodiphenoxyethane (II). These widely used additive fire-retardants are primary candidates for use in polyolefins under development for wire and cable applications. Neither compound has been analyzed previously by capillary g.c., and there are not published methods for (II). For (I), the new method is 5 - 10 times faster than an analogous packed column method, and it has 100 times lower detection limits and twice the precision of a gas chromatographic/mass spectrometric method.