Identification of Organic Additives in Nitrile Rubber Materials by Pyrolysis-GC-MS

The criteria for assessing the quality of rubber materials are the polymer or copolymer composition and the additives. These additives include plasticizers, extender oils, carbon black, inorganic fillers, antioxidants, heat and light stabilizers, processing aids, cross-linking agents, accelerators, retarders, adhesives, pigments, smoke and flame retardants, and others. Determination of additives in polymers or copolymers generally requires the extraction of these substances from the matrix as a first step, which can be challenging, and the subsequent analysis of the extracted additives by gas chromatography (GC), GC-mass spectrometry (MS), high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), HPLC-MS, capillary electrophoresis, thin-layer chromatography, and other analytical techniques. In the present work, nitrile rubber materials were studied using direct analytical flash pyrolysis hyphenated to GC and electrospray ionization MS in both scan and selected ion monitoring modes to demonstrate that this technique is a good tool to identify the organic additives in nitrile rubber