Headspace Solid Phase Microextraction Procedure for the Detection of Polychlorinated Biphenyls in Seawater Sample

Abstract

Headspace solid phase microextraction combined with gas chromatography (HS-SPME–GC) method has been studied for determination of 7 polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in seawater samples. To perform the HS-SPME polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) (7, 30 and 100 µm film thickness) fibers were compared on the basis of their absorption capacities for the selected compounds, and PDMS 100 µm film thickness was selected. The influence of various parameters on PCBs extraction efficiency by HS-SPME was studied using GC-electron capture detector (ECD) compared with solid phase. The performance of proposed HS-SPME–GC methodology with respect to linearity, reproducibility and limit of detection (LOD) was evaluated by water spiked with target compounds. The linear range of most compounds was found to be between 0.1 and 100 µgL−1 and the limits of detection were between 15.2 and 63.8 ngL−1. The reproducibility of the method (n = 6), expressed as relative standard deviation (RSD), was between 4 and 10%. Finally, developed procedure was applied to determine selected PCBs in seawater samples.