Chemometrics assisted fluorimetry for the rapid and selective determination of heavy polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in contaminated river waters and activated sludges

S. BORTOLATO, J. ARANCIBIA, G. ESCANDAR

ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

AMER CHEMICAL SOC

Lugar: Nueva York; Año: 2011 vol. 45 p. 1513 - 1520

0013-936X

The most concerned polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) benzo[a]pyrene, dibenz[a,h]anthracene, chrysene,benzo[b]fluoranthene, benzo[k]fluoranthene and benz[a]anthracene were simultaneously determined in the presence of other 10interfering PAHs, applying second-order multivariate calibration to the data obtained with a flow-through optosensor interfaced to afast-scanning spectrofluorimeter. Using a sample volume of 2.5 mL, detection limits in the range 5-115 ng L-1 were obtained ininterfering samples, with a sample frequency of ca. 15 samples per hour, and with a minimum use of organic solvents, competing veryfavorably with chromatographic methods. The significance of this study lies in the solution of the quantitative analysis problem of sixPAHs in real matrices of unknown composition. The unfolded partial least-squares/residual bilinearization (U-PLS/RBL)algorithm showed the best performance in resolving the complex studied system.