The gas chromatographic determination of volatile fatty acids in wastewater samples: Evaluation of experimental biases in direct injection method against thermal desorption method
- Title
- The gas chromatographic determination of volatile fatty acids in wastewater samples: Evaluation of experimental biases in direct injection method against thermal desorption method
- Author
- Jan Edward Szulejko
- Keywords
- Wastewater; Retention time shifting; Matrix effect; Volatile fatty acid; Heating mantle vaporization
- Issue Date
- 2014-04
- Publisher
- ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, PO BOX 211, 1000 AE AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS
- Citation
- Analytica Chimica Acta, 11 April 2014, 820, 159-167
- Abstract
- The production of short-chained volatile fatty acids (VFAs) by the anaerobic bacterial digestion of sewage (wastewater) affords an excellent opportunity to alternative greener viable bio-energy fuels (i.e., microbial fuel cell). VFAs in wastewater (sewage) samples are commonly quantified through direct injection (DI) into a gas chromatograph with a flame ionization detector (GC-FID). In this study, the reliability of VFA analysis by the DI-GC method has been examined against a thermal desorption (TD-GC) method. The results indicate that the VFA concentrations determined from an aliquot from each wastewater sample by the DI-GC method were generally underestimated, e.g., reductions of 7% (acetic acid) to 93.4% (hexanoic acid) relative to the TD-GC method. The observed differences between the two methods suggest the possibly important role of the matrix effect to give rise to the negative biases in DI-GC analysis. To further explore this possibility, an ancillary experiment was performed to examine bias patterns of three DI-GC approaches. For instance, the results of the standard addition (SA) method confirm the definite role of matrix effect when analyzing wastewater samples by DI-GC. More importantly, their biases tend to increase systematically with increasing molecular weight and decreasing VFA concentrations. As such, the use of DI-GC method, if applied for the analysis of samples with a complicated matrix, needs a thorough validation to improve the reliability in data acquisition. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
- URI
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003267014001950http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11754/51660
- ISSN
- 0003-2670
- DOI
- 10.1016/j.aca.2014.02.012
- Appears in Collections:
- COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING[S](공과대학) > CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING(건설환경공학과) > Articles
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