Environmental pollution monitoring water analysers

Tschmelak, J., G. Proll, J. Riedt, et al. 2005. Biosensors for unattended, cost-effective and continuous monitoring of environmental pollution Automated water analyser computer supported system (AWACSS) and river analyser (RIANA). Int. J. Environ. Anal. Chem. 85 837-852. 

SPE has been applied to phthalate esters (plasticisers in PVC), polar pesticides (agricultural usage) and for other continuous pollution monitoring problems and environmental analyses [272]. For these applications SPE has largely displaced LLE as the preferred technique for the preparation of liquid samples, e.g. EPA method 506 is concerned with the determination of phthalates and adipate esters in drinking water. 

In recent years, the importance of monitoring and controlling environmental pollutants has become apparent in all parts of the world. As a result, analysts have increased their efforts to identify and determine toxic substances in air, water, wastewaters, food, and other sectors of our environment. Ion chromatography has been demonstrated to be a valuable tool for these analyses. 

Although this book focuses on high-throughput analyses in the pharmaceutical industry, applications in environmental analysis are closely related. The same technologies are applicable to both fields. Pharmaceuticals have been monitored as pollutants in surface water, soil, food, and human plasma. In environmental applications, as many as 30 to 40 analytes have been monitored simultaneously. 

Steroid hormones are found as pollutants in drinking water, waste water, river and sediments. The major concerns of analytical methodologies for monitoring steroid hormones from environmental samples are extraction techniques from aqueous or solid matrices. Since sample volume or amount is not an issue in most cases, SPE is the method of choice. Both LC-MS/MS and GC-MS technologies are broadly applied for steroid analyses of environmental samples, such as LC-MS/MS analyses of steroid hormones in effluents of wastewater treatment plants [100] and estrogens in water [101,102], and GC-MS analyses of steroid hormones in environmental water [34,45, 78, 79], A study by Grover and colleagues showed that GC-MS was the simplest technique in determination of steroid hormones in environmental water samples, but lack of sensitivity LC-MS/MS was more sensitive than GC-MS, but susceptible to matrix interferences and GC-MS/MS was the recommended technique, because it was more selective and sensitive than GC/MS and LC-MS/MS [103],... 

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