Determination of Polyvinyl Alcohol Using Gel Filtration Liquid Chromatography

Gel filtration chromatography using a TSKgel G2000 SW column coupled with differential refractive index detection was used to analyse five grades of polyvinyl alcohol. Limits of detection and quantification for the assay were 0.14 mg mL^–1, 0.47 mg mL^–1 respectively. The inter and intra-day co-efficient of variance were both <7%. There was a significant difference (p<0.05, n=5) between the calibration curves across the five grades of PVA due to a refractive index range of 13.0790 –1.3181 (n=3). The assay accuracy was 98.99% ± 8.97% (n=5) and 90.60% ± 7.87% (n=5) of a spiked PVA sample was recovered from a commercial formulation.