Application of thermal desorption-mass spectrometry for the analysis of environmental pollutants

Thermal desorption (TD) has a wide range of environmental applications, from monitoring personal exposure to toxic chemicals in the workplace to ambient and indoor air quality monitoring and to the determination of volatiles in soil and water matrices (DeLuca et al., 1990; Marbot, 1997; Coleman and Chung, 2002; Liu et al., 2002). Large numbers of samples are needed to relate ambient carbonaceous 80materials to pollution sources and to assess their environmental and health consequences. This demands fast, simple, and sensitive analytical methods. Solvent extraction (SE) followed by GC-MS analysis has been the most widely used approach for carbonaceous materials collected from sample matrices. Despite some documented advantages of using SE-GC-MS methods (e.g., selectivity, feasibility), it is labor and time consuming, which limits the number of samples that can be analyzed. It also requires large sample loadings that are not normally acquired in speciation networks.