Electrothermaly conditioned carbon fibre for the analysis of volatile pollutants

Abstract

This study deals with the development of an inexpensive and single-step sorbent manufacturing methodology for the analysis of air pollutants. Disposable carbon fibre sorbents were prepared in a few minutes using the electrothermal conditioning technique. The sorbent conditioning current and time were optimised to obtain the best extraction of benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylenes (BTEX) from the air samples. After sorbent characterisation, analysis parameters affecting the BTEX extraction efficiency, such as sampling volume, humidity and sampling flow rate, were optimised for active BTEX sampling. Under optimum conditions, validation parameters such as the limit of detection (LOD), repeatability, reproducibility, and linear range were found to be 0.07–0.11 mg m − 3, 1.1%–1.8%, 5.6%–9.5% and 0.24–45 mg m − 3, respectively. Thereafter, the BTEX analysis was successfully conducted using the proposed method, with acceptable recovery values (96%–103%) in the real indoor environments.