Solid-phase microextraction semivolatile organics

Solid-phase microextraction (SPME), a new solvent-free sample preparation technique, was invented by C. Arthur and J. Pawliszyn in 1990. This method was mainly applied for the extraction of volatile and semivolatile organic pollutants in water samples. However, since 1995, SPME has been developed to various biological samples, such as whole blood, plasma, urine, hair, and breath, in order to extract drags and poisons in forensic field. The main advantages of SPME are high sensitivity, solventless, small sample volume, simplicity, and rapidity (Liu et al., 1998). 

This chapter focuses on three widely used techniques for extraction of semivolatile organics from liquids liquid-liquid extraction (LLE), solid-phase extraction (SPE), and solid-phase microextraction (SPME). Other techniques may be useful in selected circumstances, but these three techniques have become the extraction methods of choice for research and commercial analytical laboratories. A fourth, recently introduced technique, stir bar sorptive extraction (SBSE), is also discussed. 

The newly developed solid-phase microextraction (SPME) technique, first reported by Pawliszyn in 1989, is increasingly used for the gas chromatographic determination of a wide variety of volatile and semivolatile organic compounds in water or aqueous extracts of different substrates. Basically, it involves the extraction of specific organic analytes directly from aqueous samples or from the headspace of these samples in closed vials. The extraction is achieved onto a fused-silica fiber coated with a polymeric liquid phase. After equilibration, the fiber containing the absorbed or adsorbed analyte is removed and thermally desorbed in the hot injector port of a gas chromatograph or in an appropriate interface of a liquid chromatograph. ... 

Hageman, K. J., Mazeas, L., Grabanski, C. B., Miller, D. J., and Hawthorne, S. B., Coupled subcritical water extraction with solid-phase microextraction for determining semivolatile organics in environmental solids. Anal. Chem., 68, 3892-3898, 1996. 

Microwave-assisted desorption coupled to in situ headspace solid-phase microextraction (HS-SPME) was first proposed as a possible alternative pretreatment of samples collected from workplace monitoring. Therefore, pretreatment that takes a short time and uses little or no organic solvents has led to the recent development of a new extraction technique. Solid-phase micro-extraction (SPME) coupled with GC analysis has been used successfully to analyze pollutants in environmental matrices. MHS has been developed to achieve one-step, in situ headspace sampling of semivolatile organic compounds in aqueous samples, vegetables, and soil [7, 55-58]. 

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