It is well known that surfactants increase the solubility of hydrophobic organic compounds and cause adverse environmental effects. The removal of these compounds from the contaminated soil or ground-water is particularly difficult due to their water soluble feature. In this work, an ultra-high performance hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatographic method was developed for the separation of oligomers of Triton X-100 octylphenol-polyethoxylate non-ionic surfactant. Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) was used to identify the Triton X-100 compounds. There was a 44 mass unit difference between two adjacent peaks that is the molar mass of one ethylene oxide group (–CH 2 CH 2 O–). A quadratic retention model was applied for the estimation of retention of the examined non-ionic surfactant and the optimization of gradient elution conditions. The optimized method was suitable for the baseline separation of 28 Triton X-100 oligomers in five minutes.
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