Environmental Analysis

Direct coupling of SFE with GC has advantages over the off-line alternative.

As environmental legislation becomes more stringent, the need to deliver quantitative results in shorter times and greater volumes is necessary for routine environmental analysis. Most of the high-throughput screening methods used to analyze pharmaceutical compounds are, however, useless for environmental monitoring. This is because these methods primarily aim to retrieve as much information from a single sample using the broadest range of techniques. The chromatographic separation process is considered to be the bottleneck in the process. This is not the situation for environmental procedures, in which the bottleneck is the sample preparation step and is usually very tedious and time-consuming.

In this article, the authors look at ways to increase sample throughput for routine environmental analysis. Several strategies aimed at enhancing laboratory productivity are highlighted and illustrated with from-the-floor applications.

The authors propose the use of supersaturated experimental designs for composite sampling and demonstrate their efficiency and economy in the environmental screening of pesticide residues.

New miniaturized liquid-membrane extraction designs are especially suited for speciation studies of metal ions in small amounts of biological fluids.

The authors evaluted the performance of a high-capacity anion-exchange column specifically designed for use with hydroxide eluents for fulfilling the requirements of EPA Method 300.0 Part A and compared the results with data generated with an anion-exchange column using carbonate eluents.

This column describes the principles of stir-bar sorptive extraction and presents some typical applications.

The authors discuss two environmental applications for accelerated solvent extraction.

The author configured a purge-and-trap GC-MS system that simultaneously improved chromatographic resolution and reduced analysis time.