Investigation of the sulfur speciation in petroleum products by capillary gas chromatography with ICP-collision cell-MS detection

Recent regulations concerning the low-sulfur gasoline require analytical methods able to provide specific information on sulfur containing compounds present in petroleum products at the ng g ^-1 range. The on-line coupling of capillary GC with ICP-collision cell-MS was proposed for the speciation of sulfur in hydrocarbon matrices. The technique showed an absolute detection limit 0.5 pg for a 1 μL sample injected in the splitless mode which is about two orders of magnitude lower than the currently used techniques.