Determining Peroxide in Inks: Concentration and Kinetics of Formation

Certain solvent based inks have a propensity to form peroxides with time.  This can lead to degradation of printer components, dyes and other changes to ink chemistry leading to issues with print quality.  This presentation describes a novel procedure for the quantitation of peroxides.  The procedure utilises the fact that organic peroxides oxidise nitrites to yield nitrates.  The quantitation of nitrates by ion exchange chromatography facilitates the estimation of peroxide concentration.  Additionally, we show the calculation of reaction order, rate constant, reciprocal half life and activation energy.