Determination of heterocyclic aromatic amines in airborne particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10) from different emission sources by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry

Abstract

A novel ultrasound assisted extraction procedure was developed prior to the determination of heterocyclic aromatic amines by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometric detection. Airborne particulate matter PM2.5 and PM10 samples (n = 34) were collected during the spring season from urban residential emission sites, as well as from biomass burning. The organic compounds were extracted from the quartz fiber filter by a quick ultrasound assisted methanol-based extraction. Linearity of the method was in the range 0.58 ng g−1 to 50 ng g−1 with correlation coefficients (R2) from 0.993 to 0.999. The limits of detection resulted to be between 0.19 ng g−1 and 3.27 ng g−1. The relative standard deviations varied from 5.4 to 8.5 (n = 3). The recoveries ranged from 83% to 109% for all of the analytes. Concentrations of the analytes in PM2.5 were between 4.1 ng m−3 (2.07 ng g−1) and 240.9 ng m−3 (120.5 ng g−1), meanwhile in PM10, were from 23.0 ng m−3 (11.4 ng g−1) to 355.1 ng m−3 (176.2 ng g−1). The proposed methodology resulted simple, rapid and accurate for its application to the determination of heterocyclic aromatic amines in airborne particulate matter from different emission sources.