Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

Development of novel analytical methods to detect emerging contaminants in aqueous environmental matrices using large-volume injection

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  • It is the responsibility of humans, as environmental stewards, to monitor our impact on the environment so that efforts can be made to remediate the effects of our actions and change behaviors. To better understand our environmental footprint, sensitive and simple analytical methods are needed to quantify the contaminants that we discharge into our natural surroundings. Emerging environmental contaminants are of particular concern because there is limited or no information available on their occurrence, fate, and toxicity. As a result, the implications of using these chemicals are not well understood. Therefore, accurate environmental data are needed to help scientists and government policy-makers make informed decisions on research directions and chemical regulation. However, challenges exist for the analysis of emerging contaminants, including a lack of suitable analytical standards and internal standards, their broad range of chemical properties, and that they are frequently present at trace levels and in complex environmental matrices. The work presented within this dissertation focuses on the development, validation, and comparison of analytical methodologies based on large-volume injection high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) for the analysis of emerging environmental contaminants in aqueous environmental matrices. Large-volume injection (e.g. 900 μL to 4,500 μL) is an analytical technique that eliminates sample preparation associated with pre-concentration by injecting larger-than-traditional volumes of sample directly onto a HPLC column. In Chapter 2, a direct aqueous large-volume injection method was developed and validated for the quantification of natural and synthetic androgenic steroids in wastewater influent, wastewater effluent, and river water. This method was then applied to hourly composite samples of wastewater influent that were taken over the course of a single day. This work expands on the research of the endocrine-disrupting chemicals that occur in wastewater and provides an estimate of the community use/abuse of synthetic androgenic steroids. Environmental analytical methods should be as environmentally friendly as possible and efforts should be made to reduce the waste generated during analysis while maintaining analytical performance. In Chapter 3, a method based on large-volume injection was compared to two methods based on solid-phase extraction. The purpose of this comparison was to demonstrate that the same method performance could be achieved by large-volume injection as that by solid-phase extraction while reducing waste, labor, and costs. Estrogens and perfluorinated chemicals were used as model analytes and wastewater influent was used as a model matrix. The results of this study provide convincing reasons for analysts to adopt large-volume injection as an alternative to solid-phase extraction. In Chapter 4, a novel analytical method was developed and validated to quantify newly-identified and legacy fluorinated chemicals in groundwater. The final method combined micro liquid-liquid extraction, non-aqueous large-volume injection, and orthogonal chromatographic separations. Ground water samples collected from six different U.S. military bases was used to demonstrate the method. This is the first report on the occurrence of these newly-identified fluorinated chemicals in any environmental media and serves as a rational for conducting future research on their environmental fate and toxicity. The breadth of the research presented in this dissertation advances the field of environmental analytical chemistry in several areas. First, classes of environmental contaminants for which there is limited (synthetic androgenic steroids) or no (newly-identified fluorochemicals) environmental data were studied. Second, novel methods based on direct-aqueous and non-aqueous large-volume injection were developed and validated to identify and quantify those contaminants. Third, it was demonstrated that solid-phase extraction is not a "necessary evil" needed to develop methods for emerging environmental contaminants in aqueous matrices. Finally, this work is a platform on which other environmental chemists can use to develop large-volume injection methods in the future.
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