The determination of alcohol and ether sulfates and their respective alkyl carbon distributions in detergent formulations by gas chromatography

Abstract

Four fractions, isolated by the procedure pre-sented in a previous paper, are analyzed by gas chromatography to obtain additional information about the formulation. The alkyl homolog distribu-tion of ethoxylated alcohol nonionic is determined by the gas chromatography (GC) analysis of the re-sultant alkyl iodides (RI-FNI) produced by the pre-viously reported procedure. The relative ratio of alco-hol sulfate to ethoxylated alcohol sulfate is determined by the GC analysis of the combined acid-hydrolyzed products of these two active ingredients. The alkyl homolog distributions of the alcohol sul-fate (AS) and ethoxylated alcohol sulfate are then individually calculated after GC analysis of the resultant alkyl iodides produced from the two in-gredients by the previous procedure. The source of the original alcohol reactants can often be identified by the characteristic alkyl homologs which are produced by the presented techniques.