The Synthesis of Surfactant Coated Glass Foam to Extract and Determine Trace Quantities of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Drinking Water

Abstract

The present work deals with a simple, inexpensive, sensitive, high performance and economic technique for extracting and preconcentrating trace quantity of PAHs compounds through glass foam modified with CTAB surfactant. Solution desorption was employed subsequently for transferring the extracted PAHs into a gas chromatography-mass spectrometry’s injection port. BET, TGA, and FT-IR were used to characterize glass foam and CTAB/glass foam. Operative parameters in PAHs extraction and preconcentration such as amount of sorbent, pH, recovery solvent type, ionic power of solution, contacting time, and recovery time were enhanced to quantitatively determine PAHs. Analytical statistics of merit including limit of detection, accuracy, and linear range were determined to prove the suitability of our suggested technique. The CTAB/glass foam represented higher sensitivity to detect very lower concentration of PAHs such as phenanthrene, fluorene, pyrene and anthracene at ng mL^-1 level with high accuracy for drinking water samples.