Determination of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Wastewater by Single-Drop Microextraction Coupled to Capillary Gas Chromatography

This study describes an analytical method employing capillary gas chromatography (GC) using flame ionization detection (FID) that has been developed for the simultaneous determination of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in wastewater, including naphthalene, 1-naphthol, 2-naphthol and anthracene. For this purpose, single-drop microextraction (SDME) was applied as a sample preparation technique. The SDME parameters such as types of extractants, volume of the microdroplet size, extraction time, stir rate and immersion depth of needle point were investigated and optimized. The method was linear in the ranges from 2.3 ×10-3 to 70.0 μg·mL-1 for naphthalene, 1-naphthol and anthracene, and 2.2 ×10-3 to 50.0 μg·mL-1 for 2-naphthol with R2 ≥ 0.9990. The SDME procedure allowed efficient recovery of the investigated PAHs ranging between 94 % and 104 % with a relative standard deviation (RSD) ≤4.2 for actual wastewater sampes spiked with 5, 10 and 20 μg·mL-1 of PAHs, respectively. These results showed the potential of this technique for PAHs monitoring in wastewater samples. Furthermore, the investigated methods are simple, reliable, reproducible, and not expensive.