Comprehensive description of the photodegradation of bromophenols using chromatographic monitoring and chemometric tools

A general procedure for the study of complex photodegradation processes of environmental pollutants based on chromatographic monitoring and chemometric method is proposed. The procedure consists of multiset data analysis of aliquots collected at different reaction times and injected in High-Performance Liquid Chromatography coupled to diode array detection and mass spectrometry (HPLC–DAD-MS). In this study, photodegradation of six bromophenols with different degrees of bromination has been investigated in order to find out their photodegradation pathways and kinetics and to show the potential of the procedure proposed. Multivariate curve resolution-alternating least squares (MCR-ALS) has been used to resolve chromatographic elution profiles and pure spectra of species involved in the photodegradation process and, hence, to elucidate the photodegradation mechanism and to propose the chemical structure of the main photoproducts. This study shows that chromatographic monitoring is the preferred option when photochemical systems with large number of components with similar spectra and kinetic evolution are analyzed. This work reveals the advantages of the double DAD and MS detection to provide mechanistic and structural information about these complex photodegradation processes.