The recent FDA publication of a list of harmful and potentially harmful constituents has resulted in the development of a number of new or revised analytical methods for smoke chemistry. This paper describes the extension of Health Canada method, T-116, to include the determination of ethyl benzene, furan, vinyl acetate, nitromethane from a single smoking.

Independent aliquots of the sample extract are analyzed using two analytical runs in the existing method. The challenge was to incorporate the new compounds into these analytical runs, while maintaining comparable limits of detection. Ethyl benzene was directly incorporated into an existing analytical run. However, vinyl acetate, furan and nitromethane required an additional run due the diverse nature (polarity and functional groups) of the compounds analyzed.

This extended method was used to investigate the emissions from a set of 12 brands that included typical Canadian cigarettes, a ‘little’ cigar, a cigarillo and the Kentucky Reference 3R4F cigarette. Products were smoked under three smoking regimens defined by puff volume (mL), duration (seconds), frequency (seconds) and vent blocking (%); 35/2/60/0% (ISO), 55/2/30/100% (Canadian Intense (CI)), 60/2/30/50% (ISO/TC 126 WG 9 Option B (WG9B)).

Ethyl benzene yields ranged from 1.9 to 40.1 µg/cig (LOD = 0.160 (ISO), 0.321 (CI and WG9B)); Furan from 3.5 to 70.3 µg/cig (LOD = 0.090 (ISO), 0.181 (CI and WG9B)); Nitromethane 27 to 1390 ng/cig (LOD = 5.21 (ISO), 10.4 (CI and WG9B)); and vinyl acetate 52.6 to 955 ng/cig (LOD = 8.25 (ISO), 16.5 (CI and WG9B)).

The relationship between constituent yield and tar was basically linear for the emissions and cigarettes in the study. However yields for the ‘little’ cigar and cigarillo were obviously different from those of the cigarettes in the study.