Simultaneous thermal analysis/mass spectrometric detection of biological hazards.

A simultaneous working TA-MS instrument has been used to investigate the thermal behaviour and the decomposition of a series of toxic organic compounds such as flame protected polymers and chlorine-substituted aromatic products that are known to be injurious to health. The temperature-dependent TA-MS data given by the TG, DTG, DTA and MS results lead to a nearly complete description of the degradation properties of the materials. This includes the identification of the main decomposition components by means of in situ quadrupole MS ranging up to 511 a.m.u. The maximum working temperature of the coupling system with 1400 K has proved to be sufficient for the applications reported in this paper. From our investigations of hexa(penta)chlorobenzene and pentachlorophenol it can be concluded that there is a good correlation between the characteristic TA data and the course of the ion current intensities as a function of temperature. This can be shown for each detected mass fragment containing different numbers of chlorine atoms as well as for the molecular ions according to the relative abundance of their isotopes.