| As one of the important tobacco additives, tobacco flavor is a very complex physicochemical mixture, containing individually-added compounds (natural and synthetic) and botanical preparations. In order to modify the basic taste of the smoke and establish the style of the cigarette product, the tobacco flavor is added to cigarette usually. Therefor, for consistent tobacco flavor products from different sources and batches, it is essential to develop analytical methods for quality control of tobacco flavor.In this paper, a method of flash evaporation-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (FE-GC/MS) has been established for qualitative and quantitative analysis of tobacco flavors. FE parameters including FE temperature and sample mass were optimized. And chromatograms with good reproducibility were obtained when250℃as FE temperature for the low viscosity samples and350℃for the high viscosity samples, and0.4mg of sample amount were selected. Main components, such as furfural, vanillin, heliotropin and so on, were characterized by mass spectrometry. By comparing with ultrasound-assisted liquid-liquid extraction (ULLE) method, the results obtained by FE-GC were proved suitable for analysis of different viscosity of tobacco flavor.Then, each batches of tobacco flavors with different viscosity were determined by FE-GC, and their FE-GC fingerprints were established. The similarities of the different batches of tobacco flavor No.1148, No.1168and No.1146were above0.994, 0.992and0.968. Furthermore, the samples mixed with other kind of flavor components were successfully distinguished from the tobacco flavor samples No.1148, No.1168and No.1146by two pattern recognition methods, i.e. principle component analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis.Thus, the results proved that FE-GC/MS with principle component analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis is a rapid, convenient and solvent-free method suitable for the the quality control of tobacco flavors with different viscosity. |
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