Pressurized liquid extraction of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from soil samples

Abstract

A Pressurized Liquid Extraction (PLE) method was developed by using conventional High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC). It was found that all of the PAHs have been successfully extracted with dichloromethane-acetone with high percentage recovery. A high temperature of 180°C gave the highest recovery for fluoranthene (94.4%). Meanwhile, fluorene showed the highest recovery at 150 bar, with 94.6% recovery. It is noted that there is no significant day-to-day difference in the efficiency of the developed method, with the R.S.D. values averaging at 0.02. The optimized conditions applied to the soil samples were analysed using the High Temperature High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HT-HPLC) with chromatographic conditions: Octadecylsilyl-silica (ODSsilica) column (100 mm × 4.6 mm I.D.); mobile phase acetonitrile:water 40:60 (v/v); flow rate 2.5 mL/min; temperature 70°C; UV absorbance 254 nm; injection volume 5µL.