SEPARATION OF PCB CONGENERS USING ACTIVE COAL COLUMNS

The affinity of active coal for the planar PCBs has been utilized to effect a structural separation of these congeners from the rest of the PCBs, thereby eliminating potential interferents and improving the quality of analytical data. With two conventional active coal columns, non-ortho, mono-ortho and di-ortho substituted chlorobiphenyls (PCB) in a sample extract, are separated into three distinct fractions. Congener identification, quantification and confirmation are carried out partly by dual-column high resolution GC/ECD, and partly by GC/MS (non-ortho PCB congeners). The method has been applied to herring samples and, among the PCB congeners determined, are IUPAC No 77, 126, 169 (non-ortho PCBs), 118, 105, 156 (mono-ortho PCBs) and 52, 101, 110, 153, 138 and 180 (di-ortho PCBs).