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COMPARISON OF COMMON SOLVENT EVAPORATION TECHNIQUES IN ORGANIC ANALYSIS
Citation:
Erickson, M., M. Giguere, AND D. Whitaker. COMPARISON OF COMMON SOLVENT EVAPORATION TECHNIQUES IN ORGANIC ANALYSIS. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C., EPA/600/J-81/379.
Description:
Isolation of organic constituents from water frequently involves an extraction with a large volume of organic solvent which must be reduced to achieve the desired sensitivity. The objective of this research was to evaluate common solvent evaporation techniques to determine which are acceptable for use in pollutant analysis. Techniques for solvent reduction from 200 to 10 mL (macro) and 8 to 0.2 mL (micro) were evaluated. The macro concentration techniques included Kuderna-Danish (K-D) concentration, rotary evaporation, evaporation on a hot plate in an Erlenmeyer flask, and heated nitrogen blowdown with a modified Snyder column. A series of model compounds covering a wide range of boiling points (108 and 323C) and polarity was used. Based upon recovery efficiency alone, nitrogen blowdown was significantly superior to the other macro techniques; however, its extreme slowness gave K-D the highest Figure of Merit. With methylene chloride as the solvent, nitrogen blowdown with a column was the superior technique.