Study On Key Impurities In Vitamin E Acetate Synthesis

Drug and food safety has attracted increasing attention due to its importance. The laws and regulations related to food and drug quality are constantly upgraded. As an important drug and food additive, vitamin E acetate which is widely used is mainly synthesized chemically. Impurities with similar structures and physical and chemical properties to vitamin E acetate usually form during the chemical synthesis of vitamin E acetate and are quite difficult to separate from the desired product in industrial production. So it is necessary to study the chemical structures and formation mechanisms of these impurities, which does a great favor to control the product quality by eliminating or reducing them by optimizing reaction conditions.In this paper three key impurities were fractionated and purified from vitamin E acetate through column chromatography and different processes of preparative liquid chromatography. Characterized by IR, UV-Vis, LC-MS, GC-MS and NMR, two of three impurities are diastereoisomers, which might be produced by competitive reaction during Friedel-Crafts alkylation. The third impurity comes from one of important intermediates isophytol by comparing its chemical structure with Vitamin E Acetate.