Controlling contamination for determination of ultra-trace levels of priority pollutants chlorophenols in environmental water matrices

Abstract

Recently, environmental scientists have been focused their attention on the occurrence of emerging contaminants in water, such as disinfection by products (DBPs), including chlorophenols. These pollutants can be a public health problem due to their carcinogenic properties. In this work, ultra-high pressure liquid chromatography (UHPLC) coupled to a photodiode array detector (PDA) was used for the development of an analytical method capable of simultaneous identification and quantification of two chlorophenols namely, 2-chlorophenol and 2,4-dichlorophenol in water samples. In addition, a solid phase extraction (SPE) procedure for the extraction of these compounds was optimized. The chlorophenols were separated by an Acquity BEH C18 (100 × 2.1 mm, 1.7 μm) column with a mobile phase of acetonitrile/ultrapure water/formic acid (55/45/0.1, v/v/v). The flow rate of the mobile phase was 0.4 mL min−1. The optimized SPE–UHPLC/PDA technique was evaluated in terms of robustness, considering the enrichment factor for all of the studied chlorophenols. Linear calibration was obtained with correlation coefficients r2 ⩾ 0.998. Intra-day and inter-day precision was less than 5% and accuracy ranged from 99.95% to 103.32%, respectively. The obtained extraction recoveries were higher than 98%. The pre-concentration factor was 2.500 for the both analytes. Under optimized conditions, the detection limits of the overall SPE–UHPLC/PDA method were in the ng L−1 level. The excellent performance of the developed method, as well as the short analysis time makes it a promising analytical tool for the screening of chlorophenols in environmental water samples. Keywords: Water quality, Chlorophenols, Extraction, Liquid chromatography