Determination of individual homologues and total content of benzalkonium chloride by reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography using a short butyl column.

Benzalkonium chloride (a mixture of alkylbenzyldimethylammonium chlorides that usually contains C-10, C-12, C-14, and C-16 homologues), commonly known as BKC, is used as a bacteriostatic agent in many household, food, and drug products. In this paper, we report a simple, rapid, robust, and stability-indicating reversed-phase HPLC method using a short butyl (C4) column for the simultaneous determination of each individual homologue content, as well as the total concentration of individual homologues in commercial bulk raw material batches of BKC samples. The chromatographic separation was performed on a 5 cm ACE C4 column with mobile phase consisting of water, acetonitrile, and potassium chloride. Even though using a short column can potentially cause some challenges to resolving certain critical pairs of peaks, we have successfully separated all of the analyte peaks (including those from stressed, degraded products) on a short column using an optimal mobile phase.