Abstract
Recently per- and polyfluorinated alkyl compounds (PFAS) were discovered as new emerging persistent organic pollutants. They have been found in air, biota tissue, solid and aqueous matrices around the globe. A method has been developed for the determination of 41 PFAS (one fluorotelomer sulfonate, seven perfluorosulfonates, three perfluorosulfinates, seventeen perfluorocarboxylic acids, three fluorotelomer acids, three unsaturated telomer acids, four perfluorosulfonamides and three perfluorosulfonamidoethanols) in water samples. In addition 18 mass-labelled internal standards (IS) from the same group of substances were introduced. Two litres of water sample are filtered with glass fibre filter (GFF) and extracted by solid phase extraction (SPE) with Oasis WAX-cartridges from Waters. Extraction of particulate matter (> 1.2 μm) is carried out with sonication. All extracts are analysed using high performance liquid chromatography-electrospray ionisation-tandem mass spectrometry. The method detection limits for the water and particle phase were in the range of tens to hundreds ppq. Except for compounds which have no appropriate mass-labelled IS the recoveries for the particle phase range from 65 to 128% using sonication and for the filtrate they range from 80 to 121% using SPE.
