Monitoring of trifluoroacetic acid concentration in environmental waters in China

It is critically important and extremely meaningful to determine the concentration of TFA in the environmental water in China. This will create background reference for the effects of analyzing the extensive employment of the substitutes to CFCs in China. In this paper a set of analytical methods was described for use in monitoring of trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) concentration of environmental waters including collecting, pre-treatment measures, preserving, concentrating and derivatization of samples from different kinds of environmental waters. The GC with electrical capture detector (ECD) and headspace auto sampler were used in the analysis. The lowest detection limit of the instrument is 0.0004 ng methyl trifluoroacetic acid (MTFA), and the lowest detected concentration with the method is 3.0 ng/ml TFA. TFA collected in various environmental water samples (including rainfall, inland surface water, ground water, and waste water) from nine provinces and autonomous regions in China have been determined by applying the analytical methods created and defined in this work. The results indicate that the concentrations of TFA in nine rainfalls and three snowfalls through the period from 2000 to 2001 ranged from 25 to 220 ng/l, the TFA concentration in the inland surface water samples ranged from 4.7 to 221 ng/l, the concentration of TFA in groundwater samples collected in Beijing was 10 ng/l, and the TFA concentration in coastal water samples ranged from 4.2 to 190.1 ng/l.