Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are a group of organic compounds that are mainly released to the environment due to anthropogenic sources of pollution. They are classified as persistent organic pollutants, some of them are cancerogenic and mutagenic. PAH accumulate in the soil, where they can reach concentrations dangerous to human health. For this reason, it has become essential to monitor concentrations of PAH in the soil.
In order to develop an extract clean-up method, I optimized solid phase extraction of PAH from water. Several different SPE cartridges were tested, of which Supelco LC-18 cartridge gave the best results. I evaluated the effect of sample flow, evaporation, and the addition of NaCl and acetone on the efficiency of SPE. Evaporation of solvent led to significant losses of naphthalene, acenaphthene and fluorene, which were even higher when evaporation at higher temperatures was used. Acetone in PAH solution lowered the extraction efficiency, meanwhile, the addition of NaCl didn’t affect it significantly. Repeatability of SPE was also evaluated and relative standard deviations were in the range of 4.3-8.7 %.
Extraction from soil was optimized by using artificially spiked soil (10 µg PAH/g soil), that was left in a fume hood overnight (approximately 20 h) to evaporate the solvent. The efficiency of ultrasonic extraction from this soil was in the range 3.1-81.2 % and was even lower when SPE clean-up was used. The method mentioned above for soil spiking is not appropriate for more volatile PAH (naphthalene, acenaphthene and fluorene), due to their evaporation. Better efficiency of ultrasonic extraction was obtained with the use of freshly spiked soil (74.8-90.4 %). Also, in this case, SPE clean-up led to low extraction efficiency (under 20 % for all PAH).
Repeatability of ultrasonic extraction of PAH from freshly spiked soil was tested with soil with 2 µg PAH/g soil. Extraction efficiencies were within 76.1-90.1 %. Similar results were obtained with the freshly spiked soil that contained 1 µg PAH/g soil.
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