Project Information

Founding Source: Unitatea Executiva pentru Finantarea Invatamantului Superior, a Cercetarii, Dezvoltarii si Inovarii (UEFISCDI)

Project Code: PN-II-RU-TE-2014-4-1010

Project No.: 282/01.10.2015

Project Title: Influence of the chromatographic analysis of flame retardants on the estimation of human exposure to organohalogenated compounds

Project description

Flame retardants (FRs) are materials that inhibit or resist the spread of fire that are added to polymers migrate into and behave in the indoor environment and finally influence the human exposure which are used in consumer goods. There is limited knowledge about the mechanisms via which these chemicals to such compounds. Since higher elution temperatures are needed when applying conventional chromatographic techniques for their determination, FRs might undergo thermal degradation and therefore errors occur in their analysis. The estimation of human exposure to FRs is based on reported levels for such compounds in several matrices like food or indoor dust. By the use of thermogravimetric analysis combined with theoretical computations, this project addresses the evaluation of the most probable degradation products and investigates the thermal degradation mechanisms of selected brominated FRs. Further, the most commonly applied in the scientific literature chromatographic temperature programs combined with mass spectrometric detection will be evaluated in order to identify the formation of the degradation products of the tested FRs. Resembling conditions applied for the thermos-degradation studies, the differences in FRs concentrations for extracts obtained from analyzing a batch of indoor dust samples will further be calculated. The obtained results will be used for evaluation of the human exposure based on commonly accepted ingestion figures reported for indoor dust.

Project Objectives

Team Members

Results/Results Dissemination