Simultaneous Determination of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons and Their Nitro-derivatives in Airborne Particulates by Using Two-dimensional High-performance Liquid Chromatography with On-line Reduction and Fluorescence Detection

Abstract

An analytical method using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with fluorescence (FL) detection was developed for simultaneously analyzing 10 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and 18 nitro-derivatives of PAHs (NPAHs). The two-dimensional HPLC system consists of an on-line clean-up and reduction for NPAHs in the 1st dimension, and separation of the PAHs and the reduced NPAHs and their FL detection in the 2nd dimension after column-switching. To identify an ideal clean-up column for removing sample matrix that may interfere with detection of the analytes, the characteristics of 8 reversed-phase columns were evaluated. The nitrophenylethyl (NPE)-bonded silica column was selected because of its shorter elution band and larger retention factors of the analytes due to strong dipole-dipole interactions. The amino-substituted PAHs (reduced NPAHs), PAHs and deuterated internal standards were separated on polymeric octadecyl-bonded silica (ODS) columns and by dual-channel detection within 120 min including clean-up and reduction steps. The limits of detection were 0.1-9.2 pg per injection for PAHs and 0.1-140 pg per injection for NPAHs. For validation, the method was applied to analyze crude extracts of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) samples and achieved good analytical precision and accuracy. Moreover, the standard reference material (SRM1649b, urban dust) was analyzed by this method and the observed concentrations of PAHs and NPAHs were similar to those in previous reports. Thus, the method developed herein has the potential to become a standard HPLC-based method, especially for NPAHs.

Keywords

• polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon
• nitropolycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon
• hplc
• fluorescence detection
• airborne particulate matter