Initial Work for Automation of Organochlorine Pesticides and Polychlorinated Biphenyls in Water

---

This application note describes work done in collaboration with Paul Leather of Environment Agency on the method development of an on-line automated solution for Organochlorine Pesticides (OCPs) and Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs). The manual method traditionally uses large sample volumes due to the level of enrichment required in order to reach the required limits of detection. Although the miniaturised automated extraction procedure cannot match the concentration factors achieved in the manual process, the increased sensitivity of the Agilent 5977B High Efficiency Source (HES), along with large volume injection (LVI) can potentially be used to obtain the required method performance. The automation and miniaturisation of the customer OCP method showed increase in sample throughput (100%), reduce solvent consumption (at least 160 litres) and disposal cost, reduction in sample size and hence storage space requirements, whilst producing accurate and reproducible data. This initial investigation demonstrates how the improved sensitivity of the HES offers the option for a fully automated solution for extraction and analysis of OCPs and PCBs in water.

Downloads