Determination of Alitame in Beverages by Ion Chromatography

Ion chromatography (IC) was applied to the determination of alitame in beverages. Five grams of sample were diluted to 25.0 mL with water. For carbonated beverages, the sample solution should be degassed by heating in a water bath at 60 ℃ for 30 min with stirring. If any colorant was present, it should be removed by adsorption with active carbon with centrifugation for 15 min. The pretreated sample solution was filtered on a 0.22 μm filtering membrane and was ready for IC analysis. The anion exchange column IonPac AS19 was used for separation and high-purity KOH solutions of various concentrations produced by a KOH eluant generator were used in the gradient elution, with flow-rate of 1.0 mL·min-1. Conductivity detection with the DS6 conductivity detector was adopted. Linearity range of the method was found between 4.0 to 200 mg·L-1 of alitame, and the lower limit of determination (10S/N) was found to be 0.2 mg·kg-1. Tests for recovery and precision were made by addition of alitame standard solution to samples of carbonated beverage and fruit juice beverage, giving values of recovery in the range of 86.0%-96.4% and values of RSD′s (n=5) in the range of 0.82%-2.2%.