Determination of seven non-regulated disinfection byproducts in Tehran drinking water

Abstract

Introduction: Reaction of disinfection reagents, particularly chlorine, with natural organic material existing in raw water, results in production of a wide range of organic compounds, also known as disinfection byproducts. Despite their sever impacts on human health, only a tiny fraction of disinfection byproducts is regulated and controlled. Material and methods: In the present work, a novel solid-phase microextraction Arrow coupled with GC-MS has been developed, optimized and implemented for determination of seven non regulated disinfection byproducts; trichloroacetonitrile, dichloroacetonitrile, 1,1-dichloro-2-propanone, chloropicrin, bromochloroacetonitrile, 1,1,1-trichloro-2- propanone and dibromoacetonitrile. A central composite design was used to optimize the extraction parameters. Results and discussion: The method was sensitive enough to detect traces of the target compounds, with LOD values of 0.4-20 ng L-1. Also, quantitative analysis was possible over a wide linear range of about four orders of magnitude (50 to 100000 ng L-1 with R2 values of more than 0.997) with reasonable precision (RSD% values of less than 21.6% at 50 ng L-1. relative recoveries were between 60 and 95 %. Conclusion: The optimized technique was also successfully implemented for determination of the target compounds in ten drinking water samples and as result, most of them were observed in various concentration levels.

Keywords

• disinfection byproducts
• drinking water
• gas chromatography-mass spectrometry
• solid-phase microextraction arrow