The maintenance of the second-order advantage: Second-order calibration of excitation–emission matrix fluorescence for quantitative analysis of herbicide napropamide in various environmental samples

A rapid non-separative spectrofluorometric method based on the second-order calibration of excitation–emission matrix (EEM) fluorescence was proposed for the determination of napropamide (NAP) in soil, river sediment, and wastewater as well as river water samples. With 0.10 mol L−1 sodium citrate–hydrochloric acid (HCl) buffer solution of pH 2.2, the system of NAP has a large increase in fluorescence intensity. To handle the intrinsic fluorescence interferences of environmental samples, the alternating penalty trilinear decomposition (APTLD) algorithm as an efficient second-order calibration method was employed. Satisfactory results have been achieved for NAP in complex environmental samples. The limit of detection obtained for NAP in soil, river sediment, wastewater and river water samples were 0.80, 0.24, 0.12, 0.071 ng mL−1, respectively. Furthermore, in order to fully investigate the performance of second-order calibration method, we test the second-order calibration method using different calibration approaches including the single matrix model, the intra-day various matrices model and the global model based on the APTLD algorithm with nature environmental datasets. The results showed the second-order calibration methods also enable one or more analyte(s) of interest to be determined simultaneously in the samples with various types of matrices. The maintenance of second-order advantage has been demonstrated in simultaneous determinations of the analyte of interests in the environmental samples of various matrices.