Determination of atrazine and simazine in water samples by high-performance liquid chromatography after preconcentration with heat-treated diatomaceous earth

A sensitive and selective column adsorption method is proposed for the preconcentration and determination of atrazine and simazine. Atrazine and simazine were preconcentrated on heat-treated diatomaceous earth as an adsorbent and then determined by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Several parameters on the recoveries of the analytes were investigated. The experimental results showed that it was possible to obtain quantitative analysis when the solution pH was 2 using 100 mL of validation solution containing 1.5 μg of triazines and 5 mL of ethanol as an eluent. Recoveries of atrazine and simazine were 95.7 ± 4.2% and 75.0 ± 1.9% with a relative standard deviation for seven determinations of 4.7% and 2.7% under optimum conditions. The maximum preconcentration factor was 100 for triazines when 500 mL of sample solution volume was used. The linear ranges of calibration curves for atrazine and simazine were 1–150 ng mL−1 and 1–300 ng mL−1, respectively, with correlation coefficients of 0.999 and the detection limits (3Signal-to-Noise) were 0.24 ng mL−1 and 0.21 ng mL−1 for atrazine and simazine. The capacity of the adsorbent was also examined and found to be 0.8 mg g−1 and 1.3 mg g−1 for atrazine and simazine, respectively. The proposed method was successfully applied to the determination of triazines in river water and tap water samples with high precision and accuracy.