Determination of Sucrose Fatty Acid Esters by High-performance Liquid Chromatography.

The procedure for the quantitative analysis of the ester composition of the sucrose fatty acid esters (SE) is described. SE were separated into their esters from monoester to octaester by the reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) with a ternary stepwise gradient of water, methanol and tetrahydrofuran. These esters were detected by an evaporative light scattering detector (ELSD). ELSD is suitable for gradient elution because it is completely insensitive towards volatile components, such as the solvents typically used in HPLC. Each ester was cut from the HPLC column, treated with alkali, and determined colorimetrically by using anthrone reaction. The measured value was evaluated by comparison with that of another method using refractive index detection. This procedure investigated can proveide the baseline separation into their esters in HPLC and the simultaneous determination of all esters on a single run. Furthermore, this procedure is more convenient than other methods since it uses sucrose as a standard for quantification.