Testing for toxic organic contaminants in environmental samples often requires the following three sample preparation steps: 1) Extraction, 2) Concentration, and 3) Analysis. The goal during these three steps is to isolate the contaminants from the sample matrix and concentrate them so they can be detected and quantified. In this blog, I will discuss the importance of understanding how different types of concentration equipment can impact your analyte recoveries and the overall performance of your extraction procedure.
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In the world of environmental testing, many labs encounter extremely dirty samples. For example, EPA Method 1664B is the protocol for extracting oil and grease from wastewater samples. More often than not, these types of samples are really dirty, requiring loads of pre-filters, glass wool, and filter aid in order to get the entire liter of water through the disk. Well, there is!
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When juggling the responsibilities of working in a sample preparation lab as well as working as an analyst, it is very easy to get caught up in a never-ending cycle of samples. There is no situation “more frustrating” then when you have a bunch of wastewater samples that need to be extracted and analyzed ASAP and there is that one sample that is so much more challenging to extract than the others.
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Have you ever had days of extracting oil and grease samples and thought to yourself “there must be an easier way to work with wastewater samples”? Whether you run oil and grease samples by liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) or by solid-phase extraction (SPE) it can be challenging at times to efficiently extract 1-liter samples due to the sample matrix.
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There’s nothing more satisfying than successfully extracting a really challenging sample. Solid phase extraction (SPE) is a powerful technique for extracting semi-volatile organic compounds and hexane-extractable materials (HEMs). When the chemistry is tailored to meet the requirements of the application, literally hundreds of compounds can be extracted with a single pass of solution through an SPE disk.
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Solid phase extraction is a powerful technique – it can be used to clean up the most challenging samples, and extract and preconcentrate hundreds of semivolatile organic compounds.
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