Development of a dynamic headspace - capillary GC - MS method for the determination of ultra-trace levels of vinyl chloride in water samples and during migration studies

Abstract

A method based on automated dynamic headspace sampling followed by thermal desorption – capillary GC – MS was developed to monitor ultratraces of vinyl chloride in water samples. The method shows excellent performance including a limit of quantification (LOQ) below 10 ng/L, good linearity (r2 > 0.999) in the 10 to 200 ng/L concentration range and an RSD below 10% at all calibration levels. The method was applied to study the release of traces of vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) in water from aged polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipes installed in water supply systems. A solution to avoid this leaching would be the insertion of a polyethylene pipe inside the PVC pipe provided that vinyl chloride does not permeate through polyethylene. Vinyl chloride migration through a high density polyethylene (HDPE) film was therefore studied with the developed sampling method.