Mass Spectrometric Identification of Surfactants

Summary

Various types of pure cationic and anionic surfactants have been analyzed by mass spectrometry using field desorption (FD) and “fast atom bombardment” (FAB) as ioization techniques. The FD spectra of all surfactants are dominated by quasimolecular ions while structure specific fragments are usually missing or of low abundance. In the contrary, the FAB method yields both quasimolecular ions and structure specific fragments. If these ionization techniques are combined with the method of collisionally activated decomposition (CAD) in a tandem mass spectrometer a direct mixture analysis is possible. It will be demonstrated that this approach can be used to identify surfactants in surface water.