Analysis of Halogenated Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Soil Samples Using Gas Chromatography Coupled with Triple Quadrupole Mass Spectrometry

Abstract

Halogenated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (XPAHs) are chlorinated or brominated derivatives of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Due to their toxicities, such as neurotoxicity, deformability and carcinogenicity, and physicochemical properties, such as long-range transportation and semi-volatility, they are recognized as emerging pollutants, and have attracted widespread attention in recent years. Even though occurrence characteristics of XPAHs in some environmental matrices have been studied, such as air collected in Beijing and Japan, most of other environmental matrices have not been well studied, such as soil samples. Therefore, quick and effective analytical techniques and methods are necessary to be developed to fulfill the analytical requirements. In this study, a method of gas chromatography coupled with triple quardrupole mass spectrometry (GC-MS/MS) was established for qualification and quantitation of 37 XPAHs in soil samples. The operation parameters of gas chromatography and mass spectrometry were explored to achieve the best separation and detection of XPAHs, the pretreatment method was optimized, and the effectiveness of the analytical method was verified. The results showed that the detection limits of XPAHs were 0.03-1.17 pg/g, and recoveries were 43.7%-115%. Comparison of GC-MS/MS method established in this study and high-resolution gas chromatography coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRGC-HRMS) method established in our previous studies showed that both the accuracy and sensitivity were comparable. This indicated that the GC-MS/MS method could meet the quantitation requirement of XPAHs in soil samples. Finally, this method was applied to analyze XPAHs in soil samples collected from Hebei Province. The concentrations of XPAHs in the collected soil samples were 648-11 868 pg/g, lower than that in soil samples collected from e-waste dismantling sites (13.2-278 ng/g) reported in previous studies. The levels and distributions of XPAHs in the collected samples could be affected by the anthropogenic activity sources, such as industrial production and emissions around the sampling sites.

Keywords

• gas chromatography coupled with triple quadrupole mass spectrometry (gc-ms/ms)
• analytical method
• halogenated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (xpahs)
• soil