Extraction of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and organochlorine compounds from water: A comparison between solid‐phase microextraction and stir bar sorptive extraction

Abstract

Abstract The enrichment of semi‐volatile compounds from water using solid‐phase microextraction (SPME) and stir bar sorptive extraction (SBSE) was compared. The investigations (analysis of PAHs and organochlorine compounds) were performed to compare SPME‐GC/MS and SBSE‐thermodesorption‐GC/MS. Additionally, SPME fibres and stir bars were desorbed in a small volume of solvent and analysed by HPLC with fluorescence detection. This method was applied to PAHs. SBSE is more robust and under the given conditions (extraction from a 10 mL sample, 1 h exposure time of fibres and stir bars) enables higher recoveries (20.1–97.2%) for the compounds investigated than SPME (recoveries of 6.3–51.6%). Detection limits between 0.1 and 4.5 ng/L were calculated for the SPME‐GC/MS combination, whereas the SBSE‐GC/MS combination enabled detection limits between 0.05 and 1.0 ng/L. Coupled to HPLC, the detection limits of the PAHs investigated were found to range between 1.0 and 10.0 ng/L (SPME) or between 0.3 and 2.0 ng/L (SBSE). The advantage of SPME is that the procedure can be completely automated, which is not possible when combining SBSE with GC or LC.