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DETERMINATION OF ORGANOPHOSPHORUS COMPOUNDS BY GC-ICPMS
Citation:
ROSAL, C. G., G. MOMPLAISIR, AND E. M. HEITHMAR. DETERMINATION OF ORGANOPHOSPHORUS COMPOUNDS BY GC-ICPMS. Presented at 2006 Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry, Tucson, AZ, January 08 - 14, 2006.
Impact/Purpose:
Provide state-of-the-science sampling, analysis, separation, and detection methods to allow rapid, accurate field and laboratory analyses of contaminated soils, sediments, biota, and groundwater to support Superfund clean-up decisions. Apply state-of-the-science methods in chemical analysis and data interpretation (e.g., mass spectral interpretation) to actual problems of OSWER, the Regions, and the States, in cooperation with the Las Vegas Technical Support Center as well as by direct contacts with Regional and State employees. Provide technical advice and guidance to OSWER using the environmental chemistry expertise (e.g., mass spectrometry, analytical methods development, clean-up methodology, inorganics, organometallics, volatile organics, non-volatile organics, semi-volatile organics, separation technologies, etc.) found within the branch.
Technical research support for various projects initiated either by Regions/Program Offices or ECB scientists. While these efforts will support the Regions and Program Offices, they cannot be predicted or planned in advance, and may serve multiple duty (e.g., solve real-world problems, serve to ground-truth analytical approaches that ECB is developing, transfer new technology). Many of the activities in this task support requests involving enforcement decisions and therefore are categorized as "environmental forensics".
Description:
Accidental or intentional release of neurotoxic organophosphorus (OP) pesticides and OP chemical warfare agents (CWAs) are potential threats to public health and the environment. Such a release could involve any number of a large suite of OP chemicals. These compounds, as well as their transformation products, would be widely distributed in all environmental media. Therefore, effective exposure assessment and remediation would require analytical methods that could detect a wide range of OP analytes after rapid, and preferably automated, extraction from the matrix. Conventional extraction methods, such as purge-and-trap for volatiles and Soxhlet for semivolatiles, can be time-consuming and suffer from matrix effects. The most widely used technique to determine OP compounds is gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), which can be adversely affected by concomitants that mask the OP mass spectra. Therefore, the Environmental Protection Agency National Exposure Research Laboratory in Las Vegas (EPA Las Vegas) is investigating alternatives to conventional extraction and analytical methods.
Vacuum distillation (VD) is a technique developed at EPA Las Vegas that rapidly extracts both volatile and semivolatile analytes from a wide range of matrices, and injects them into an on-line GC [1]. ICPMS can provide sensitive, multielemental detection of phosphorus and other heteroatoms found in OP pesticides and CWAs. Therefore EPA Las Vegas is currently investigating the application of VD-GC-ICPMS for the analysis of environmental samples for OP pesticides and CWAs. This presentation discusses preliminary results of the first phase of that project, developing and evaluating the GC-ICPMS method.