Separation of nitroaromatics and their transformation products in soil around ammunition plants: New high performance liquid chromatographic charge transfer stationary phases

A series of environmental chemicals, mainly nitroaromatics and their transformation products, contaminating soil around former ammunition plants, was analyzed by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) employing 2 reference and 5 recently synthesized new stationary phase materials. The new phases were demonstrated to possess unique separation properties. Quantitative structure-retention relationships (QSRR) were derived relating retention parameters to hydrophobicity parameters, hydrogen-bond descriptors and structural parameters from molecular modeling. Multivariate chemometric analysis of HPLC retention data determined on the seven stationary phases by the principal component analysis (PCA) method allowed for assignment of individual pollutants to defined chemical classes (e.g. metabolic routes).