Determination of Volatile Organic Compounds in Drinking Water by EPA Method with Static Headspace GC-MS

Introduction

Determination of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) has been well established by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to monitor VOCs pollutant in drinking water. The EPA method 524.3 uses purge and trap with gas chromatography - mass spectrometry to extract and analyze VOCs quantitatively in drinking water. Headspace is considered as an alternative to extract the VOCs from drinking water. In a previous study, the dynamic headspace has proven to be able to extract VOCs and meets the EPA 524.3 quality control requirement. Details of analysis conditions and results were described in the Shimadzu Application News (No. AD-0073, 2014). In this report, we describe the results of a further study of analysis of VOCs in drinking water using static headspace method. It is known that static headspace is relatively less efficient in extraction of VOCs compared to dynamic headspace. To compensate this drawback, Selected Ion Monitoring (SIM) mode of GCMS was used in data acquisition. The results of this study show that static headspace coupling with GC-MS operated in SIM mode for VOCs analysis meet all of the requirements, the Initial Demonstration of Capability (IDC) and Ongoing Quality Control specified in EPA 524.3.

June 10, 2015 GMT