Enrichment of polychlorinated biphenyls in river water by using magnetic adsorbents with high selectivity to nonplanar aromatic compounds and their analysis with gas chromatography–mass spectrometry

Abstract

AbstractPreviously our group reported a magnetic adsorbent, magGO@bottlebrush, which has high selectivity to nonplanar aromatic compounds with two or more phenyl rings. In this work, the magGO@bottlebrush was used for pre‐concentration of seven frequently concerned polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB28, PCB52, PCB101, PCB118, PCB138, PCB153, and PCB180) from river water samples, considering PCBs are hydrophobic compounds with two substituted benzene rings and have nonplanar structure, and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) was used for the quantification. Several parameters affecting the extraction efficiency of the seven PCBs were investigated, under the best concerned extraction conditions, the developed method had excellent linearity (R2 > 0.9951) within the range of 1–100 pg/ml, it also possessed low limits of detection (0.33–0.90 pg/ml, S/N = 3) for the PCBs. Then, the enrichment and detection methods were applied to determine PCBs in two local rivers. PCB101, PCB118, and PCB138 were detected in one river, and their concentrations were 1.31, 0.69, and 10.01 pg/ml, respectively. The spiked recoveries of the river water samples were 63.33–119.29%, and the relative SD values were less than 17.33%. These results show that the proposed method has great potential application for the analysis of PCBs in river water samples.