Determination of aspirin, phenacetin and caffeine in a mixture

High performance liquid chromatography is used for the separation and quantitative analysis of a wide variety of mixtures, especially those in which the components are insufficiently volatile and/or thermally stable to be separated by gas chromatography. This is illustrated by the following method which may be used for the quantitative determination of aspirin and caffeine in the common analgesic tablets, using phenacetin as internal standard where APC tablets are available the phenacetin can also be determined by this procedure. 

Sample mixture. A suitable sample mixture is obtained by weighing out accurately about 0.601 g of aspirin, 0.076 g of phenacetin and 0.092 g of caffeine. Dissolve the mixture in 10 mL absolute ethanol, add 10 mL of 0.5M ammonium formate solution and dilute to lOOmL with de-ionised water. 

Solvent (mobile phase). Ammonium formate (0.05M) in 10 per cent (v/v) ethanol-water at pH 4.8. Use a flow rate of 2 mL min-1 with inlet pressure of about 117 bar (1 bar = 105 Pa). 

Column. 15.0 cm x 4.6 mm, packed with a 5/on silica SCX (strong cation exchanger) bonded phase. 

Procedure. Inject 1 fiL of the sample solution and obtain a chromatogram. Under the above conditions the compounds are separated in about 3 minutes, the elution sequence being (1) aspirin (2) phenacetin (3) caffeine. Measure peak areas with an integrator and normalise the peak area for each compound (i.e. express each peak area as a percentage of the total peak area). Compare these results with the known composition of the mixture discrepancies arise because of different detector response to the same amount of each substance. 

---