Fully Automated Liquid-Liquid Extraction Method Using a GERSTEL Dual Head Robotic with Robotic Pro of Organochlorine Pesticides and Polychlorinated Biphenyls in Water

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The automation and miniaturisation of methods used for routine testing can provide several advantages to the customer. These include improved samples throughput, time saved from previous manual preparation procedures, reduced solvent consumption, reduced sample volumes (reducing required storage space) and less health and safety risks to analysts. Data quality is also invariably improved. The GERSTEL Robotic and Robotic Pro platforms offer some distinct advantages over the more established XT platform. This work demonstrates how the improved technology is able to be used for methods developed on previous GERSTEL MPS XTs and describes the method development of a fully automated solution for liquid-liquid extraction using a GERSTEL Robotic Pro dual head MultiPurpose Sampler (MPS) and Agilent GC-MS system. The method employed for this work utilises Liquid-Liquid Extraction (LLE) of a mixture of OCP pesticides and PCBs from water. Linearity (10-200 ng/L) and repeatability on both an Agilent 5977B HES single quadrupole and a 7010 HES triple quadrupole mass spectrometer was carried out. Linearity for both systems showed R² typically greater than 0.995 and an RSD for the internal standard of 4.3%. The use of PrepAhead yielded throughput gains of 100%, with an associated 15-fold reduction in both hands-on analyst time and solvent consumption.

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