Analysis of volatile fatty acids in wastewater collected from a pig farm by a solid phase microextraction method

The main purpose of this study is to develop a reliable Solid Phase Microextraction (SPME) method for monitoring the concentration of volatile fatty acid (VFA) in the wastewater collected from pig farms. Ten volatile fatty acid species were spiked in 2 ml of swine wastewater and extracted with a carbowax coated extraction fiber to evaluate the accuracy and precision of the method. The fiber was introduced into a gas chromatography system by thermal desorption and detected by a mass spectrometer detector. The estimated method detection limits ranged from 11.5 mM/L for formic acid to 0.03 mM/L for heptanoic acid. The method is more sensitive than the sample direct injection method. The percentage recovery of analytes ranged from 77.3 for propanoic acid to 114.1 for formic acid at the spike level of 19.09mM/L. The compound absorption rate varied significantly with the fiber absorption time for n-Valeric, isocaproic, n-caproic and heptanoic acids. An SPME method with twenty minutes fiber absorption and three minutes thermal desorption was tested in this study and resulted in good reproducibility for analyzing VFAs in swine wastewater. The method may be applied for scanning a wide spectrum of polar organic compounds in environmental samples. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.