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

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has developed a standard method namely EPA 524.3 to identify and quantify the purgeable organic compounds in finished drinking water by using purge-and-trap with GC-MS. This study showed that the Shimadzu HS-20, a headspace with trap mode, could serve as an alternative option in extracting purgeable VOCs from drinking water. The MS detector was tuned based on the 4-bromofluorobenzene mass spectrum criteria prior to sample analyses. Correlation coefficients of all calibration curves are more than 0.998. Recoveries of calibration standards, internal standards and surrogate standards are within the allowable range which is ±50% of the lowest level true value, ±30% of all other points. HS-20 trap mode coupled with GCMS-QP2010 Ultra provides another choice of VOCs analysis which complies with the EPA Method 524.3.