Chemical Fingerprinting of Mobile Volatile Organic Compounds in Soil by Dynamic Headspace-Thermal Desorption-Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry

The chemical analysis of organic compounds in environmental samples is often targeted on predetermined analytes. A major shortcoming of this approach is that it invariably excludes a vast number of compounds of unknown relevance. Nontargeted chemical fingerprinting analysis addresses this problem by including all compounds that generate a relevant signal from a specific analytical platform and so more information about the samples can be obtained. A dynamic headspace-thermal desorption-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (DHS-TD-GC-MS) method for the fingerprinting analysis of mobile volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in soil is described and tested in this article. The analysis parameters, sorbent tube, purge volume, trapping temperature, drying of sorbent tube, and oven temperature were optimized through qualitative and semiquantitative analysis. The DHS-TD-GC-MS fingerprints of soil samples from three sites with spruce, oak, or beech were investigated by pixel-based analysis, a nontargeted data analysis method.