Determination of Aroclor 1260 in soil samples by gas chromatography with mass spectrometry and solid-phase microextraction

Field Analysis of Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) in Soil Using Solid-Phase Microextraction (SPME) and a Portable Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry System

An expedited field analysis method was developed for the determination of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in soil matrices using a portable gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) instrument. Soil samples of approximately 0.5 g were measured with a portable scale and PCBs were extracted by headspace solid-phase microextraction (SPME) with a 100 µm polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) fiber. Two milliliters of 0.2 M potassium permanganate and 0.5 mL of 6 M sulfuric acid solution were added to the soil matrices to facilitate the extraction of PCBs. The extraction was performed for 30 min at 100 ℃ in a portable heating block that was powered by a portable generator. The portable GC-MS instrument took less than 6 min per analysis and ran off an internal battery and helium cylinder. Six commercial PCB mixtures, Aroclor 1016, 1221, 1232, 1242, 1248, 1254, and 1260, could be classified based on the GC chromatograms and mass spectra. The detection limit of this method for Aroclor 1260 in soil matrices is approximately 10 ppm, which is sufficient for guiding remediation efforts in contaminated sites. This method was applicable to the on-site analysis of PCBs with a total analysis time of 37 min per sample. However, the total analysis time could be improved to less than 7 min per sample by conducting the rate-limiting extraction step for different samples in parallel.

Simultaneous quantification of Aroclor mixtures in soil samples by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry with solid phase microextraction using partial least-squares regression

Multivariate partial least-squares (PLS) method was applied to the quantification of two complex polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) commercial mixtures, Aroclor 1254 and 1260, in a soil matrix. PCBs in soil samples were extracted by headspace solid phase microextraction (SPME) and determined by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS). Decachlorinated biphenyl (deca-CB) was used as internal standard. After the baseline correction was applied, four data representations including extracted ion chromatograms (EIC) for Aroclor 1254, EIC for Aroclor 1260, EIC for both Aroclors and two-way data sets were constructed for PLS-1 and PLS-2 calibrations and evaluated with respect to quantitative prediction accuracy. The PLS model was optimized with respect to the number of latent variables using cross validation of the calibration data set. The validation of the method was performed with certified soil samples and real field soil samples and the predicted concentrations for both Aroclors using EIC data sets agreed with the certified values. The linear range of the method was from 10μgkg(-1) to 1000μgkg(-1) for both Aroclor 1254 and 1260 in soil matrices and the detection limit was 4μgkg(-1) for Aroclor 1254 and 6μgkg(-1) for Aroclor 1260. This holistic approach for the determination of mixtures of complex samples has broad application to environmental forensics and modeling.