Highly sensitive determination of trace-level chlorophenols and common odorants in drinking and environmental waters

Water is a heavily regulated substance and understanding its volatile organic compound (VOC) content is crucial to ensuring consumer and environmental health. With multiple methods needing to be used to detect all analytes of concern in a sample, this makes analysis labour-intensive.

A single method is presented for the combined analysis of two important classes of contaminants in drinking and environmental waters – chlorophenols and common odorants – using immersive HiSorb high-capacity sorptive extraction and GC—MS. This method is highly sensitive, with limits of detection approximately 5 ng/L for chlorophenols and <1 ng/L for common odorants. Laboratory tests confirm excellent linearity and reproducibility, while analyses of real-world samples have confirmed the method’s performance on a range of water matrices. It can also be fully automated, enabling unattended, high sample throughput of approximately 32 samples per system per day.

Introduction

Local authorities need to invest heavily to ensure drinking water is safe and palatable, that open waters such as lakes and rivers are environmentally sound, and that there is no contamination in ground waters that might leech into the drinking water supply. Water quality is determined in part by the VOC content, which can negatively affect human health, harm aquatic wildlife and/or impart tastes or odours that residents find unpleasant.