Abstract: A method of flash evaporation-gas chromatographic (FE-GC) fingerprints with hierarchical cluster analysis was established for the quality control of the cigarette flavor samples. An amount of 0.40 mg of the cigarette flavor sample was analyzed by FE-GC at optimized the flash evaporation temperature, 350 ℃. Good reproducibility for chromatograms was obtained with the relative standard deviations (RSDs) of the retention time less than 0.22%, and the relative peak area less than 9.37%. Compared with ultrasound-assisted liquid-liquid extraction-gas chromatography (ULLE-GC), FE-GC was proved to be more suitable for the analysis of cigarette flavor samples with various viscosity. The similarity correlation coefficients were above 0.998 for the 8 batches of cigarette flavor No.1184. Furthermore, these samples could be successfully distinguished from the ones mixed with other kinds of flavor components at the mixed levels of 10%~30% by hierarchical cluster analysis. It demonstrated that the method of FE-GC fingerprints with hierarchical cluster analysis is simple, rapid, accurate, and suitable for the quality control of cigarette flavors.

Key words: cigarette flavors, fingerprint chromatogram, hierarchical cluster analysis, flash evaporation-gas chromatography (FE-GC)