Determination of polychlorinated biphenyls in transformer oil using various adsorbents for solid phase extraction

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Various adsorbents for a solid phase extraction (SPE) method were used to study their ability to separate PCBs from transformer oil to rapidly determine their sub-ppm concentration in the transformer oil. Approximately 90% of the transformer oil could be removed from the PCBs by using a hydrophilic–lipophilic balanced copolymer (HLB) adsorbent, but the recovery of deca-chlorobiphenyl (deca-CB) used as a surrogate was only 24.5% due to lose during this cleanup process. The use of a silica adsorbent gave good results with 89.9% recovery of the deca-CB. The recovery of Aroclor 1242 and 1260 were 95.4 and 90.3% on silica, and 98.9 and 83.5% on HLB, respectively. Acid treatment was an essential step in removing the ambiguous interference peaks to help identify the PCBs. A decreased sensitivity of the electron capture detection (ECD) for PCBs was observed due to the presence of the remaining trace oil after the workup procedure. This loss in sensitivity was allowed for by using tetrachloroxylene as an internal standard, and this was found to be reliable for the criteria of quality control by employing an experiment in which LCS was spiked with 2 mg/l of Aroclor 1260 and analyzed each day over a 25 day period. The MDL for the analytical method established in this study is 0.05 mg/l.