Cooling/heating-assisted headspace solid-phase microextraction of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from contaminated soils

• A novel, effective and low-cost cooling/heating assisted solid-phase microextraction (CHA-SPME) device was introduced.
• It can simultaneously cool the extraction phase and heat the sample matrix in SPME (handmade and commercial fibers), LPME, NTD, and INCAT.
• Compared to conventional methods, its extraction time is too much shorter and its efficiency is higher.
• It can be utilized to analyze complicated solid samples, with no need to sample pretreatment.

A simple, low-cost, and effective cooling/heating-assisted headspace solid-phase microextraction (CHA–HS–SPME) device, capable of direct cooling the fiber to low temperatures and simultaneous heating the sample matrix to high temperatures, was fabricated and evaluated. It was able to cool down the commercial and handmade fibers for the effective tapping of volatile and semi-volatile species in the headspace of complex solid matrices, with minimal manipulation compared with conventional SPME. The CHA–HS–SPME system can create large temperature gaps (up to 200 °C) between the fiber and the sample matrix, because the cooling process is directly applied onto the fiber.Different effective experimental parameters for the fabrication of the CHA–HS–SPME device as well as for the extraction and determination of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from solid samples were evaluated and optimized. The proposed device coupled to GC-FID was successfully applied for the extraction and determination of PAHs in contaminated soils without any sample pretreatment step. Good agreement was observed between the results obtained by the proposed CHA–HS–SPME-GC-FID method and those achieved by validated method.

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