Quantitation of organic acids in sugar refinery juices with capillary zone electrophoresis and indirect UV detection

During sugar refinement, monitoring of organic acids such as formate, tartrate, succinate, malate, glycolate and acetate in the process "juices" is important for process control. Matrix effects can lead to problems in conventional chromatographic ion analysis of these solutions. Capillary zone electrophoresis, with indirect UV detection, has been shown to be a good alternative, requiring almost no sample preparation, other than dilution, and with fast analysis time (less than 7 min). A co-elution problem for the formate-tartrate pair could be solved by adding small amounts of bivalent metal ions to the electrophoresis buffer. Quantitative analyses of the organic acids in the juices from beet sugar production and from the processing of a hydrolysed chicory root extract (Cichorium intybus) are reported.