Determination of petroselinic acid by microreactor chromatography

The microreactor-ozonolysis technique was applied to the quantitative determination of the relative amounts of petroselinic and oleic acids in seven Umbelliferae seed oils. The operation was easy and rapid. Results were excellent when the method was tested on ester mixtures of known composition. When used on esters prepared from Umbelliferae seed oils, the method gave results comparable with those found by another procedure, also described, which combined thin-layer chromatography with either gas-liquid chromatography or ultraviolet spectrophotometry.