Determination of VOCs in Water Using the New Element VOC Analyser

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Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are routinely analysed in drinking and waste water using static headspace Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (HS-GC/MS). This application note outlines the Anatune VOC Analyser which features autospiking of internal standards and enables high throughput using a customised 240 position tray and the PrepAhead option in Maestro software. For the suite of 58 compounds good linearities were achieved with all correlation coefficients r² above 0.995.  Reproducibility experiments have been carried out on 6 aliquots of spring water auto-spiked at 4 μg/l and 16 μg/l. The CVs obtained were all below 10% and the recoveries, internal standard corrected, were between 92 and 107%. Results demonstrate the successful automation, including preparation of calibration standards, with the only manual steps being addition of sample and sodium sulphate to the vial. This automated solution enables one injection to be performed every 14 minutes, resulting in the capability to run 97 samples in a 24 hour period. The application note also features a comparison of the Agilent 5975 and 5977 MS detectors, highlighting the improved sensitivity for selected compounds, further reducing the limits of detection attainable. The extension of this work to include other water types for validation is described in subsequent application note AS141.

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