A rapid pyrolytical method for the determination of wood preservatives in treated wood

Abstract

Analytical laboratories are often confronted with the question whether a board of wood has been treated with an insecticide or fungicide or not at all. Generally this question is difficult to answer in the case of organic wood preservatives and requires considerable time for analytical procedures. Therefore, a simple and rapid method for determining the most common organic wood preservatives in a one-step procedure has been developed. They were measured by gas chromatography after thermal treatment by a Curie-point pyrolyser, directly attached to the GC. Under these conditions the specific compounds tended to be predominatly vaporised rather than pyrolysed. For analysis, a mass-selective detector (MSD) was used in selected ion mode (SIM). In one analytical step, up to eight different preservatives can be identified. Detection limits were in the range between 0.01 and 0.7 g/m².