Assessment of gaseous phase PAHs emitted from marine diesel engine using vortex-assisted dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction followed by GC/MS

Abstract

A novel sample treatment, namely vortex-assisted dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction (VDLLME), followed by GC/MS has been developed for the determination of gaseous phase polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) emitted from a marine diesel engine. The method integrates extraction, enrichment, and concentration into one step by combining sample collection and VDLLME into a much shorter and accurate procedure. We have optimized several important variables influencing the extraction efficiency including type and amount of extraction solvent, type and volume of disperser solvent, sample pH, salting-out effect, vortex and centrifugation time. Under the optimum conditions, high enrichment factors (more than 1,000) and acceptable total spiked recoveries (72.0-95.1%) were obtained using GC/MS detection. The limits of detection and quantification of the proposed method were in the ranges of 0.1-0.5 ng/L. Our total pretreatment can be competed in less than 0.5 hours so as to decreases loss of PAHs by 18.37% compared to traditional methods.