Improvement of UV spectrophotometry methodology for the determination of total polycyclic aromatic compounds in contaminated soils Original Research Article

Solid phase extraction (SPE) and UV spectrophotometry is used for the determination of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in soils. A combination of aminopropyl and octadecyl bonded silica in a double SPE cartridge system has been optimized and validated using a certified reference material. The quantification is carried out after a principal component regression. The calibration has been done on a set of 40 samples of contaminated soils and has been optimized by using cross-validation. The 3σ detection limit was found to be 4.5 mg kg−1.