Determination Of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons In Qingdao Coastal Seawater

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are ubiquitous pollutants, known for their teratogenic, carcinogenetic, mutagenic and pronounced bioaccumulation in diversified environments. Nowadays PAHs have been detected in the atmosphere, water, soil, sediments, food and organism by different methods. Different laws have been passed by the People's Republic of China (PRC), the United States of America (USA), the European Union (EU) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to control over PAHs because of their wide-spread distribution in the environments and perniciousness to human health and the ecosystems.The primary sources of PAHs in marine environment are thought to be atmospheric deposition and riverine runoff. PAHs can migrate over the whole ocean system and be accumulated through the foodweb, and thus causing great damage to human health and the ecosystems. The determination of PAHs in seawater is rather difficult as their concentrations in seawater are extremely low due to their low solubility in water and high tendency to be adsorbed onto particulate matters. Therefore, no standard method was established in China on the determination of PAHs in seawater. The aim of this work is to develop a method for rapid yet precise analysis of PAHs in seawater. The method was then optimized and used for the determination of PAHs in Qingdao coastal surface seawater.(1) In this paper, 16 priority PAH pollutants which were selected by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were chosen as the target analytes. The analytical procedure was optimized for sample collection and storage, analyte extraction and cleanup, concentration and analysis. The idea was to minimize the operation steps and to simplify each step. A new close-open-close style sampler was designed for seawater collection. The liquid-liquid extraction (LLE), ultrasonic extraction (UE) and solid-phase extraction (SPE) were compared for selection of a...