Chemometric tools applied to optimize a fast solid-phase microextraction method for analysis of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in produced water.

Chemometric tools are powerful strategies to efficiently optimize many processes. These tools were employed to optimize a fast-solid phase microextraction procedure, which was used for the analysis of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in oil-based produced water using a Headspace-Solid Phase Microextraction technique (HS-SPME/GC-MS). This optimization was achieved with a 2 factorial design approach, where the final conditions for this extraction procedure were 10 μg L, 1 h, 92 °C (at headspace), and 0.62 mol L for PAHs concentration, fiber exposition to headspace, temperature, and NaCl concentration, respectively. The limit of detection (LOD) in this protocol ranged from 0.2 to 41.4 ng L, while recovery values from 67.65 to 113.10%. Besides that, relative standard deviation (RSD) were lower than 8.39% considering high molecular weight compounds. Moreover, the proposed methodology in this work does not require any previous treatment of the sample and allows to quantify a higher number of PAHs. Notably, naphthalene was the major PAHs compound quantified in all samples of the produced water at 99.99 μg L. Altogether, these results supported this methodology as a suitable analytical strategy for fast determination of PAHs in produced water from oil-based industry.