HPAE-PAD: A rapid and precise method for sugar analysis

The current method used for the analyses of glucose and fructose in pan stage products, high performance liquid chromatography with refractive index detection (HPLC-RI), is inaccurate. Non-sugars and sugar impurities interfere with the measurements and result in the overestimation of these sugars. High performance anion exchange chromatography coupled to a pulsed amperometric detector (HPAE-PAD) has been reported to provide more accurate results than HPLC-RI. The performance of the HPAE-PAD technique with final molasses, raw sugar and other pan stage products was investigated. This showed that the HPAE-PAD system gave consistent results and, unlike the HPLC-RI, could determine the concentration of glucose, fructose and sucrose in raw sugar with one chromatographic run.