Application of Nexera UC SFE Pretreatment System for Extracting Pesticide Residues from Soil

Introduction

Evaluating the persistence of pesticides in environmental soil is an important criteria for evaluating the safety of pesticides and analyzing pesticides in soil is extremely important for initial evaluations or registration of pesticides. However, in most cases, analyzing pesticides in soil using liquid-liquid extraction to extract the pesticides is very time-consuming, requires special equipment and reagents, and can cause problems, such as metal ions or other introduced ionic substances contaminating analytical instruments or the target substances being decomposed by oxidation, exothermic reactions, or other consequences of the extraction process. In contrast, supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) provides excellent extraction efficiency using supercritical carbon dioxide as the extraction solvent, which offers the low viscosity and high diffusivity of a gas and the high solubility of a fluid. Consequently, it extracts target substances quickly using smaller quantities of organic solvent than existing solvent extraction methods, making it a more environmentally-friendly method as well. This article describes an example of using the Nexera UC SFE pretreatment system to extract residual pesticides from soil.

February 17, 2016 GMT