Determination of Acrylates in Wastewater by Dispersive Liquid-Liquid Microextraction Coupled to Capillary Gas Chromatography

A simple and reliable method combining dispersive liquid-liquid microextracion (DLLME) with gas chromatography (GC) using flame ionization detection (FID) was developed for the simultaneous determination of aniline (AL), o-toluidine (o-TLD), N,N-dimethylaniline (N,N-DAL), p-chloroaniline (p-CAL), and p-nitroaniline (p-NAL) in wastewater. For this purpose, dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction (DLLME) was applied as a sample preparation technique. The DLLME conditions such as the types and volume of extraction solvent, the types and volume of the disperser solvent, pH value and salt addition were studied and optimized. The method was linear in the ranges from 2.2×10-3 to 100.0 μg·mL-1 for aforementioned aromatic amines with R2 ≥ 0.9968. The DLLME procedure allowed efficient recovery of the investigated aromatic amines ranging between 82 % and 92 % with a relative standard deviation (RSD) ≤ 3.4 for actual wastewater samples spiked with 5, 10 and 20 μg·mL-1 of aromatic amines, respectively. These results showed the potential of this technique for aromatic amines monitoring in wastewater samples. Furthermore, the investigated methods are simple, reproducible, and inexpensive.