Award Date

1-1-1994

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Chemistry

Number of Pages

131

Abstract

The purge-and-trap gas chromatographic/mass spectrometric methods used by government agencies and their contracting laboratories for the analysis of volatile organic compounds in soils require the addition of both surrogate and internal standards to the sample matrix just prior to purging the sample with an inert gas. Addition of the standards at this point in the analysis provides no information regarding the effect that the sample matrix has on the target compounds, with a resultant artificially low calculated value for the target compounds; Addition of surrogate standards to the sample matrix at the same time as the target compounds reveals patterns of response indicating which surrogates should be associated with which target compounds. Response ratios generated from these target/surrogate pairs are then applied to subsequent sample analyses within the same soil type, providing recoveries of 90-105% with low relative standard deviations; Samples spiked with target compounds then spiked with surrogate compounds three days later, provided the same accuracy and precision when analyzed at holding times of zero, two, and three days after the surrogate spike.

Keywords

Analysis; Chromatography; Gas; Mass; Organics; Patterns; Responses; Soils; Spectrometry; Volatile

Controlled Subject

Chemistry, Analytic; Organic chemistry

File Format

pdf

File Size

3276.8 KB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Permissions

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this dissertation or thesis and wish to have the full text removed from Digital Scholarship@UNLV, please submit a request to digitalscholarship@unlv.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Download


Share

COinS