RAPID, SEMIQUANTITATIVE SCREENING OF SEDIMENTS FOR AROMATIC-COMPOUNDS USING SONIC EXTRACTION AND HPLC FLUORESCENCE ANALYSIS

Awareness of contamination from anthropogenic sources in the environment has led to a demand for increasing numbers of analyses to evaluate the extent of the problem. As a result, there is a need for rapid, low cost methods to screen for contaminants in environmental samples to allow priorities to be set for the more expensive, detailed analyses. In this paper, we report a method to screen sediments for aromatic hydrocarbons. The method uses sonic extraction followed by size-exclusion HPLC with fluorescence detection to estimate the concentrations of fluorescent aromatic compounds in sediment samples. The concentrations of aromatic compounds determined by the screening method are highly correlated with the sum of the aromatic hydrocarbons determined by a standard analytical method which uses HPLC cleanup and GC/MS quantitation.