Dear Reader,
We all know that we need clean air to breathe, but in daily life this fact is often balanced against financial aspects or convenience: What measures are required to clean industrial waste gases? Can we do without the additives that lead to emissions from furniture? How bad is the short drive to the bakery by car? These examples are all relevant sources of exposure to airborne carbonyls.
Carbonyl compounds are not as hot a topic in the media as nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons, but they are among the most serious chemical hazards in the air. For example two of the most common carbonyl air pollutants formaldehyde and acrolein, are associated with respiratory diseases, autoimmune diseases or even cancer.
Thus the monitoring of carbonyl emissions is an important task and is typically carried out using the DNPH HPLC method, which is described in the DIN ISO 16000-3 standard.
We demonstrate the optimization of this HPLC method and introduce our HPLC system for the determination of DNPH carbonyl derivatives.