Analysis Methods - Review of Standard Methods
Today we will just briefly look at one small thing and then we will move on to analysis of organic chemicals in water, we will trace speciation of that, so we looked at BOD, COD, and TOC in the last class. So all these are bulk representation of organic carbon, so if you want to do speciation, what we mean by speciation is individually find out what is there organic chemical in water so the BOD, COD, TOC are good representation of state of water, clean/ nor clean you can give a very simple cut off for regulatory purposes the volume s are very large, you are looking at large areas but once you cross that you need a specific information, what is the chemical there you can also analyze the toxicity of a particular chemical in a water body by doing what is called as a Bio -assay, what it means is you assess the toxicity using the sample. For example if I want to say if a particular lake is contaminated I take that water, bring to my lab and I will put 1 test organism there and see how many of them survive. If they are having a problem, this can be done at any number of organisms, there are some indicator organisms that people use to look at bio-assay, so this is done for that, -s o usually the indicator organism is local, you cant use one that is based in Europe to bring it to Europe it will not survive for many reasons. Something that would normally survive in clean water if something will happen to it in the presence of the organic load, we know the organic load is the presence of. This is one approach for doing it this, this is done by biologists or ecological scientists they do that big section of that we are not going to discuss that here.There are also groups in which people just either look at the qualities of the organism to see specific change in the organism if something is happening to this for example if you use fish, if something is happening to the fish, like losing their sense of direction or they are losing some function so they will assess that alone and then they will go deep and see what part of the body is affected because of this so so its depending on bio- essay and you don’t have to take anything out. The other approach is to know what is there in the water then you know toxicology specific information about that chemical you can directly find out if the toxicology of that compound, so the bio -assay is good, suppose there are 10 organic compounds each of them have chemicals below the toxicity level combined together can have a toxic effect on organisms so that you cant find out from getting individual toxicity information , you can only do that by getting something like a bio- essay which is really the proof that you want so the people do that, in other words bio- essay is only the starting point of all the investigations you usually have information about receptors having a problem and then we back calculate to see what is going on the environment. So we are just closing the loop in this case, you find out what its there and then you see if this is really what is causing the problem. In any case speciation does give you valuable information as to what is there, we have to find out what is the source of the pollution, so one of the advantages of doing the speciation is to give you information pertaining to the sources. If you know the source you can go and do something about it.You also know what is the relative contribution of each source what we call as source apportionment. And this relative contribution of sources is very useful so we can target sectors, for example if you know that chemical A is coming from a articular industry you know that that industry is the primary contributor so you can go and do something about it. It gives more information you can have useful analysis of the information. To do speciation we will look at each matrix separately, we will look at water first, so we discussed general methods, what we are going to discuss is generally more specific to the instrument analysis so we looked at water, now we determine that water, we have to extract from water and then we go to processing concentration and with the instrument. So we will first look at these two things, extraction and concentration. The first, so before we go here I wanted to in our last class we couldn’t show this, the standard method, so this is the standard method for the examination of water and waste water. So lets point this out that you have to buy it its not available for free on the internet, when you go to browse you have different types of analysis. So you say individual organic compounds aggregate organic constituent, what we mean by that is what we did yesterday, you get biological, chemical oxygen demand, all of these things. So if you go to Biochemical Oxygen Demand so there is a method number 5210it says that you have to buy it but a full method you have to buy, but it gives you a general distribution of what the method is in all of these you have, there is a quality assurance page everywhere if you go to the … for every method there is a QA/QC DESCRIBED FOR EVERY analysis whether it is aggregate or individual it doesn’t matter, even if you are just weighing a small piece of paper a QA/QC is important and so they have a lot of things QA/QC is a lot more involved and what I have given you is very basic information but the philosophy behind QA/QC is the same. If you know what you need to do then you will go and find out the tools required for that so that is the module I have given you some introduction to it. The standard method of examining water, so this one is specific say methane for example its specific chemicals here that are individual organic compounds so they have this thing on extraction.This is one source, if you go back to the, so this is published by the American Public Health Association it is proprietary to them, for example you have heard of this thing called ASTM, American Testing Materials, its an organization its not a government agency, they have spent money and effort to do it so you have to buy them, standard method is a big book its there in our lab you can take a look at it if you want. So there ae individual methods for all of this if you go and look at individual organic compounds, if you look at say, so it gives you the method, so it is giving you the instrument and also what is the processing technique one line so the matrix water this is water obviously, this is applicable to water, this is the instrument that is used and this is the extraction that is used. So it gives you a bunch of other information so this is one source of this method, there are of course other sources where you can look at this method, one of them is the US EPA. If you go to the US EPA website it is very illustrative for you to go there, we will go to water. This is very relevant to the US water research methods , water data, management, it says for analysis of different things, you see different chemicals we have drinking water, so they have this method number again EPA has different methods, EPA is an open source thing I can go and access the method it is free for everybody it’s a government agency so its free there are different ad their websites are free, so you can go and access the methods its available.So again here it’s a determination of factor of fluorinated drinking water by some method of extraction and the method instrument, this is given the description is there already, so very specifically I can also look at models, we will get to models later when we start the third module we will go to the models, we will very specifically look for method for analysis o PHS in water. So you will get a document like this, if you look at this method, it gives you this method which is applicable for the analysis of all these chemicals the are all poly aromatic hydrocarbons, some of you may recognize it from your assignment one you will see this is the Ph and this is the description. Everything is given here, summary of method, then we go to interferences in this method if you use water, how should you handle it, then safety. Everything is given, this Is how you should write a lab report. When I Have to document it this has to be done, then it will stand in court so there is calibration. It says external calibration standards remember what we talked about in external standard calibration, what we normally do by taking a standard putting it into a solvent making a concentration and making a calibration chat that’s called external calibration. There is another thing called as internal calibration, we will talk about it in this discussion. There is a response factor, quality quality control we are still not talking about the method but the quality control issues accuracy and all that, the next assignment is going to be this, you have to read. I will tell you what the assignment is right away, so you have 6 chemicals chosen you pick 1 chemical, 3 chemicals and 3 matrixes , you mix and measure. So you have an experience in doing 3 different chemicals in three matrixes. The analytical instrument will change, the methods will change completely and one of them will be inorganic. So you have to read the method and give me a 1 page summary so like the summary there you have to read and extract the information.Like this there are other, this is for water this method we have seen is for waste water, like that you have methods for air, vapor phase particulate phase, solids US EPA is a good source for doing it so we don’t wan to rely on, we usually go with the EPA method because it is easily traceable. Methods are generally similar unless it is for something specific for a specific industry. You don’t go to a closed method. This opens up a whole big chunk of information that is available to you first, we did the search to get this method and we just did that, usually the have a method number, the method number is the reference. If you say I analyzed the concentration of in this water sample using method 610 done, you don’t have to describe anything else because the reference is here people can go and check this method, it’s a very subjective thing sometimes things are not available you can’t just stop the analysis because you don’t have anything that the are pulling. Any questions on this?For Air there is a lot of information about air everything we are doing its there, so air monitoring methods. Lets look at air toxics organic its telling the determination of VOC in organic compounds in air which means its a vapor phase compound. Now at some point somewhere you will see, so I think it is included in the analysis itself if you go to PO1 itself, okay we will come back to this. There is inorganic. So here is a method for determining PM, ALL OF THAT IS HERE. You also have something for criteria pollutants these are things like sulfide oxide, nitrogen. What I am going to do is I have shown you this and there is the third class this is for air, the third test is the hazardous Waste test method SW stands for solid wastes there is one for water, and one for air and one for solid wastes, or solid samples so this is for soil sludge all of those things and there is a bunch of methods for that. It’s a semi volatile organic compounds using QC/MS, same thing thing the method looks like what we saw in the other EPA method there is a description summary, what it is used for application notes and so on. You can see all this information is given there, full setup information, what is it all used for, what are you analyzing using this and it also gives you information about how to run it okay. So these are three sources that you can directly go to you just pick off what ever we did in this class when ever you wan to get any analysis method okay, what we will do in this class will help you understand how to interpret what ever is there in the method, little more fundamentally why are we selecting certain methods okay.