Coal liquids mass spectrometry analysis

Analysis of Coal Liquids by Size Exclusion Chromatography—Gas Chromatography—Mass Spectrometry... 

Tandem mass spectrometry is also developing into an important analytical method for application to coal-derived materials (Wood, 1987). The analysis of heteroatom ring species and hydrocarbon species in coal-derived liquids offers indications of the location of the heteroatoms in, or on, ring systems, as well as indications of the hydrocarbon systems. 

High-resolution mass spectrometry (MS) is one of the analytical techniques that can furnish significant information on the heterocompounds in coal liquids. This technique has been widely applied to the analysis of coal-liquefaction products (1,2,3,4) and is essentially indispensable for the detailed analysis of heterocompounds (3,5,6). 

The hydrocarbon ("oil") fraction of a coal pyrolysis tar prepared by open column liquid chromatography (LC) was separated into 16 subfractions by a second LC procedure. Low voltage mass spectrometry (MS), infrared spectroscopy (IR), and proton (PMR) as well as carbon-13 nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometry (CMR) were performed on the first 13 subfractions. Computerized multivariate analysis procedures such as factor analysis followed by canonical correlation techniques were used to extract the overlapping information from the analytical data. Subsequent evaluation of the integrated analytical data revealed chemical information which could not have been obtained readily from the individual spectroscopic techniques. The approach described is generally applicable to multisource analytical data on pyrolysis oils and other complex mixtures. 

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