Degradation of reactive dyes in wastewater from the textile industry by ozone: analysis of the products by accurate masses.

The present work describes the use of ozone to degrade selected reactive dyes from the textile industry and the analysis of the resulting complex mixture by liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC-MS). To allow certain identification of the substances detected in the wastewater, the original dyes were also investigated either separately or in a synthetic mixture of three dyes (trichromie). Since the reactive dyes are hydrolyzed during the dyeing process, procedures for the hydrolysis were worked out first for the individual dyes. The ozonated solutions were concentrated by solid-phase extraction, which separated very polar or ionic substances from moderately polar degradation products. The latter, which are the primary degradation products, were investigated by liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry with a tandem quadrupole time-of-flight mass analyzer. Accurate masses, which in most cases could be determined with a deviation of