Korea preservative treating industry has mainly used alkaline copper quaternary (ACQ) expected over 80% of market share in Korea. ACQ employs dodecyl dimethyl ammonium chloride (DDAC) and benzyl dimethyl dodecyl ammonium chloride (DBAC) for active ingredient along with copper. The strongly increasing domestic applications for wood preservatives require developing accurate and reproducible analytical methods. Although a long historical titration method has been successfully applied to quantify quaternary ammonium compounds (QACs), the method cannot tell DBAC from DDAC in the analytes. The objective of this study was to develop and optimize a method for the quantification of QACs in treating solutions and preservatives treated woods using HPLC and HPLC-MS. This study showed that the both HPLC-UV and HPLC-MS analysis resulted in accurate and reproducible analytical data for QACs quantification, compared to a titration method. The HPLC-MS method, however, produced more sensitive and specific results than HPLC-UV. The MS method was reliable for the determination of the pure DDAC in treating solution and preservative treated wood.

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