Research into conditions of quantitivity in the determination of carboniles in complex air matrices by adsorptive solid phase microextraction

This study focuses on certain aspects of the quantitivity of adsorptive solid phase microextraction when applied in the form of on-fibre derivatisation with O-(2,3,4,5,6)-pentafluorobenzyl-hydroxylamine hydrochloride (PFBHA) for the determination of carboniles in air samples of relevance in the atmosphere. The study was performed in the high-volume outdoor atmospheric simulation chambers (EUPHORE) located in Valencia (Spain). At short sampling times, the adsorption profiles obtained when only benzaldehyde was inserted in the chamber coincided with those obtained when other carbonylic compounds were also introduced at the same concentration, and this was also the case when the concentration of all the gaseous mixture components was increased considerably from one experiment to another. In a number of experiments applying different conditions, it was proven that all the extraction profiles belonged to the same regression when the fibre responses were plotted against the concentration–time product. A number of calibrations were obtained for benzaldehyde introduced in the chamber alone and in a mixture with three other carboniles at similar concentration values. A statistical test is applied to confirm that they all belonged to the same regression since they shared homogeneous variances. After these tests, the method of SPME on-fibre derivatisation for the determination of carboniles was considered to be safely applicable to quantification. Moreover, the concentration levels at which certain unwanted effects, i.e., displacement, saturation and competition, were observed are a few orders of magnitude higher than their occurrence levels in atmospheric processes.