Determination of perfluorinated carboxylic acids in water using liquid chromatography coupled to a corona-charged aerosol detector

●A HPLC-CAD method was developed for the determination of perfluorinated carboxylic acids.●The new method showed high recovery, reproducibility and excellent sensitivity.●The new method provided a wide linear range of 5–1000 μg L−1 PFCAs.●The detection limits of the method were 75–220 ng L−1 PFCAs after a preconcentration treatment.●The SPE-HPLC-CAD method was successfully applied to analyze practical wastewater samples.

Perfluorocarboxylic acids (PFCAs) are persistent pollutants being widely detected in the environment. In order to quantitatively determine PFCAs, a simple and rapid method for the simultaneous determination of five PFCAs was developed by coupling high performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) separation and corona-charged aerosol detector (CAD). The PFCAs were separated on a Symmerry® C8 analytical column (150 mm×3.9 mm) under isocratic conditions with a mobile phase consisting of 5 mM ammonium acetate (pH4.9±0.2) and methanol (30:70 (v/v)) at the flow rate 1 mL min−1. Ammonium acetate as ion pairing agent was added to the mobile phase for better separation and peak shapes. The elaborated method was validated for linearity, precision and accuracy. The detection limits ranged from 1.5 to 4.4 μg L−1 for PFCAs with C atoms of C4 to C8, which were decreased further to 75 to 220 ng L−1 after 20-fold preconcentration. The method was confirmed to have good precision with relative standard deviation of 0.9%-4.2% for intraday measurements and 0.9%-4.1% for interday measurements. The optimized method was applied to analyze practical wastewater samples with satisfactory results.

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