Improved Acetone-Butanol-Ethanol (ABE) Solution Analysis Using HPLC: Chromatograph Spectrum Deconvolution Using Asymmetric Gaussian Fit

Abstract

Currently, the analysis of acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) broths is performed using both High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and Gas Chromatography (GC) for each sample since GC cannot be used in quantifying sugars and HPLC methods are not yet efficient enough to detect all components separately. In this study, a novel method was developed to quantify all main components present in ABE model solutions (acetone, butanol, ethanol, butyric acid, acetic acid, glucose and xylose) using only HPLC. Although the HPLC operating conditions were optimized to obtain the best possible resolution in HPLC chromatograms, it was observed that the peaks for butyric acid, acetone and ethanol overlapped. The same trend was observed for glucose and xylose. Using the asymmetric Gaussian fit, a program was written in MATLAB to detect the overlapped peaks, deconvolute them and calculate the area of each separated peak. The concentrations of each component were then calculated using the areas and the calibration curves for each component. Experimental results show that this method works well for the ABE model solutions and can be used to quantify all components in the solution when there are some overlapped peaks in the HPLC chromatograms.