Isolation and Determination of Urea Herbicides in Soil by Hyphenated Chromatographic Techniques

Abstract

Eight phenylurea herbicides (chlorotoluron, isoproturon, diuron, monolinuron, linuron, metobromuron, chlorbromuron, methabenzthiazuron) were isolated from soil by extraction. The extract was cleaned up using an SPE module. Elution with a methanol‐dichloromethane mixture resulted in total recoveries using this method, which included all losses during sample preparation, ranging from 79 to 97% recovery of the herbicides from the activated silica gel sorbent column. Separation of the eight herbicides was easily achieved working under liquid chromatographic conditions. The validation of the analytical processes was described and the parameters of the LC‐DAD method are as follows: limits of detection from 0.07 to 0.13 µg/g; precision (RSD) from 2.9 to 10.4%. The proposed LC‐DAD method offers good resolution and selectivity.

Keywords:

• Environmental analysis
• Urea herbicides
• Liquid chromatography
• Solid‐phase extraction

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by Ministry of Education and Sciences (RN, Warsaw, Poland) grants No. 2P06R 075 29 and 2P06R 100 29.