Isolation and determination of volatile organic compounds from water by dynamic purge-and-trap technique coupled with capillary gas chromatography

Abstract

The preconcentration technique of purge-and-trap has been investigated in the present work for quantitative adsorption of volatile organic pollutants purged from water samples. A dynamic purging device with variable volume size has been constructed and tested to purge different concentrations of organic compounds. With Tenax GR as the adsorbent, a dynamic purge-and-trap technique was developed combining on-column preconcentration procedures using ambient trapping/thermal desorption/cryogenic focusing/back-flash injection prior to separation and determination using capillary gas chromatography. Various aromatic compounds in water were determined, giving linear working ranges over five orders of magnitude from 0.02 to 5000 μg/L. The analytical procedures were optimized under the assistance of ultrasonication with results validated for the determination of organic contaminants in underground water and tap water, giving over 93% recoveries anda detection limit of 0.01 μg/L, two orders of magnitude lower than those obtained using commercial available instruments with on-line configuration to minimize cross-contamination. The technique provides a potential automated method for in situ monitoring of volatile organic compounds in water.