Development and comparison of HPLC and MEKC methods for the analysis of cyclic sulfur mustard degradation products.

In this study, novel, fast, and simple methods based on RP-HPLC and MEKC with DAD are developed and validated for the qualitative and quantitative determination of five cyclic sulfur mustard (HD) degradation products (1,4-thioxane, 1,3-dithiolane, 1,4-dithiane, 1,2,5-trithiepane, and 1,4,5-oxadithiepane) in water samples. The HPLC method employs a C18 column and an isocratic water-ACN (55:45, v/v) mobile phase. This method enables separation of all five cyclic compounds within 8 min. With the CE method, the baseline separation of five compounds was achieved in less than 11 min by applying a simple BGE composed of a 10 mM borate buffer and 90 mM SDS (pH 9.15). Both methods showed good linear correlation (R