Chemical analysis of extracts

Raw down and feathers are obviously not clean and must be washed and separated in various steps. Depending upon how effective the washing equipment is, varying amounts of impurities can be detected through the use of water and solvents. 

According to IDFB Testing Regulations, Part 6 (see Section 2.6.3), acidity (pH) is determined in the following manner  

In a 250 ml Erlemneyer flask 1 g 0.01 g of the test specimen (cut to pieces of approximately 1.5 nun) is macerated with 5 ml of boiled distilled water until aU material is wet. Then 65 ml of boiled distilled water is added and the flask is stoppered and allowed to stand for 3 h at room temperature. It must be occasionally shaken mechanically or by hand. 

Without removing the material, the temperature is adjusted to 25 1 °C and the pH is measured potentiometrically. Report the pH to the nearest 0.1 pH unit. Occasionally the acidity is measured from the aqueous extract prepared for the determination of oxygen number and turbidity (see below) but this method is not standardized. 

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Chemical Analysis of Extracts. The extracts were analyzed by capillary column GC-MS for OCs, TAAPs, and PAHs (see the list on page 313). The GC-MS parameters used at the two laboratories are shown in Table II. The identification and quantitation were all done by using automatic routines based on a mass spectra library created from authentic standards of the selected compounds. Compounds were located by searching the reconstructed ion chromatogram for each library entry within a narrow retention time window relative to the internal standard (anthracene-dio or phenanthrene-dio). Quantitation was achieved by comparison of characteristic ion areas in the field samples with ion areas of the internal standard. These ion areas were normalized by response factors established by comparison of ion ratios of a standard mixture of all 66 analytes at a concentration of 2.5 ng//zL. 

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