Development of a full automation solid phase microextraction method for investigating the partition coefficient of organic pollutant in complex sample

• We develop a fully automated SPME method to determine the partition coefficient.
• We investigate the effect of temperature on the partition coefficient.
• The evaluation results of the proposed method show good agreement with the reported data.
• The proposed method is successfully applied for the real sample analysis.

A fully automated solid phase microextraction (SPME) depletion method was developed to study the partition coefficient of organic compound between complex matrix and water sample. The SPME depletion process was conducted by pre-loading the fiber with a specific amount of organic compounds from a proposed standard gas generation vial, and then desorbing the fiber into the targeted samples. Based on the proposed method, the partition coefficients (Kmatrix) of 4 polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) between humic acid (HA)/hydroxypropyl-β-cyclodextrin (β-HPCD) and aqueous sample were determined. The results showed that the logKmatrix of 4 PAHs with HA and β-HPCD ranged from 3.19 to 4.08, and 2.45 to 3.15, respectively. In addition, the logKmatrix values decreased about 0.12–0.27 log units for different PAHs for every 10 °C increase in temperature. The effect of temperature on the partition coefficient followed van’t Hoff plot, and the partition coefficient at any temperature can be predicted based on the plot. Furthermore, the proposed method was applied for the real biological fluid analysis. The partition coefficients of 6 PAHs between the complex matrices in the fetal bovine serum and water were determined, and compared to ones obtained from SPME extraction method. The result demonstrated that the proposed method can be applied to determine the sorption coefficients of hydrophobic compounds between complex matrix and water in a variety of samples.