Monitoring of Environmental Tobacco Smoke Nicotine with a Sorbent Bed-Capillary Gas Chromatograph System

A sorbent bed-capillary gas chromatographic analytical method well suited to monitor environmental tobacco smoke nicotine in an environmental chamber or in indoor environments has been developed. The sampled air passes directly through a glass tube filled with Tenax after which the tube becomes an insert for a packed column injector port where the sample is heat-desorbed to a cold trap and transferred to a capillary GC column. Nicotine is quantitated by the use of an external standard. The results show that this method can meet the need of monitoring nicotine in an environmental tobacco smoke chamber and can be easily applied to do routine environment monitoring. The method was used to monitor the concentration of gas phase nicotine in environmental tobacco smoke in a 30m 3 Teflon chamber. The concentration of nicotine was found to be constant with time with ordinary fluorescent room lighting. However, when a UV-light bank was turned on to simulate photochemical conditions, the concentration of nicotine decayed after a short initiation period.