Rapid Analysis of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Water Samples Using an Automated On-line Two-Dimensional Liquid Chromatography

Two-dimensional HPLC (2D-HPLC) recently has received great attention due to providing high resolving power and higher peak capacities than that of 1D-HPLC, especially dealing with a wide spectrum of sample matrices containing several components. In this work, an on-line heart-cutting two-dimensional liquid chromatography (2D-LC) method was developed using monolithic columns coupled with reversed-phase liquid chromatography (RPLC). 2D-HPLC was successfully carried out using affinity-based monolithic columns at first dimension (20 cm × 4.6 mm I.D.) followed by a Pinnacle II PAH column (50 mm × 4.6 mm I.D.) at the second dimension. Furthermore, good linearity was observed for the correlation of the benzo[a]pyrene (BaP) molecule against the peak areas (R² = 0.994) in the concentration range of 0.01–1.0 ng/mL in 30 min. The limit of detection and the limit of quantification were found to be 4.0 pg/mL and 12.0 pg/mL, respectively. Both the intra-day and inter-day precision at 0.01 and 0.1 ng/mL spiked concentrations were below than 2.35% RSD whereas the means of the recovery data of the BaP from the water samples were found to be in the range of 93.71–98.65%. These results demonstrate that the 2D-HPLC system, developed by the combination of the P(HEMA-MAPA) column and Pinnacle II PAH column, is reliable, stable, and well qualified in the extraction of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from the water samples.