Online comprehensive two-dimensional characterization of puff-by-puff resolved cigarette smoke by hyphenation of fast gas chromatography to single-photon ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry: quantification of hazardous volatile organic compounds.

This work presents the direct coupling of a custom-made smoking machine (SM) to fast gas chromatography combined with single-photon ionization mass spectrometry (GC × SPI-MS) utilizing a six-port, two-position valve for online puff-resolved comprehensive two-dimensional investigation of cigarette smoke. The innovative electron-beam pumped rare gas excimer light source (EBEL) filled with argon provided vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) photons of 9.8 ± 0.4 eV (126 ± 9 nm) for SPI. Puff-by-puff quantification of 14 hazardous volatile organic smoke constituents from the 2R4F Kentucky research cigarette was enabled for two smoking regimes, i.e., ISO and Canadian Intense, after determination of photoionization cross sections. The investigated analytes comprised NO, acetaldehyde, butadiene, acrolein, propanal, acetone, isoprene, furan, crotonaldehyde, isobutanal, butanal, 2-butanone, benzene, and toluene. The determined amounts of these compounds in cigarette smoke agreed excellently with the literature values. Furthermore, the two well-known patterns of puff-by-puff behaviors for these different smoke constituents were obtained for both whole smoke and gas-phase measurements.