Determination of Earthy-musty Odorous Compounds in Drinking Water by Vortex Assisted Dispersive Liquid-Liquid Microextraction Combined with Gas Chromatography Tandem Mass Spectrometry.

A new method was developed for the determination of eight earthy-musty compounds in drinking water by gas chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (GC-MS/MS) combined with dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction (DLLME). In this work, the type and volume of extraction solvent and dispersion agent, and the amount of NaCl were optimized; the linearity, detection limit, recovery and precision of method were investigated. The results indicated that the target analytes were in the range of 0.2 - 100 μg/L with correlation coefficient (r) ranging from 0.9991 to 0.9999, the limit of detection (LOD, S/N = 3) of the analytes ranged from 0.2 to 1.0 ng/L with the enrichment factor of 320. The mean recoveries for drinking water at three spiked concentrations levels of 0.6 - 32 ng/L were in the range of 91.3 to 103%, the precision ranged from 3.1 to 7.5% (n = 6), and the inter-day precision was from 6.1 to 11.1% (n = 5). Only one of 15 selected real samples tested positive for GSM, and the concentration was 3 ng/L. This method was confirmed to be simple, fast, efficient, and accurate for the determination of earthy-musty compounds in aqueous samples.