Determination of the Organics in Trimethylolpropane Wastewater

ABSTRACT

Organic components play a pivotal role in the treatment of trimethylolpropane wastewater; therefore, research aimed at gaining a better understanding of these components can aid in developing potential treatment methods to remove these pollutants. Thus, the use of liquid–liquid extractions coupled with gas chromatography–mass spectrometry is reported to examine the semivolatile organic components present in trimethylolpropane wastewater, while purge-and-trap coupled with flame ionization detection was used to determine the volatile organic components. Several factors which could affect the precision of the analytical method in pretreatment and detection steps were optimized. These techniques exhibited good linearity (determination coefficients greater than 0.9899), good intraday precision (less than 4.26%), and good interday precision (less than 13.09%). The optimized method was used for the determination of 23 organic components in trimethylolpropane wastewater. The main components were 2-ethylacrolein, butanoic acid, 1-hexanol, 2-ethyl-, trimethylolpropane, butyraldehyde, and toluene.

KEYWORDS:

• Gas chromatography
• liquid–liquid extraction
• organic components
• trimethylolpropane wastewater

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Major S&T Project on the Treatment and Control of Water Pollution of China (2012ZX07201-005).