Rapid determination of total trihalomethanes index in drinking water

A method for the rapid determination of total trihalomethanes (THMs) index in drinking water has been developed by using a headspace-mass spectrometry (HS-MS) system and partial least squares (PLS) multivariate regression approach. Due to the presence of residual amounts of chlorine and organic matter in the drinking water, the use of a quenching reagent in order to avoid THM generation during the sample manipulation is necessary. The optimization experiments revealed that ascorbic acid was the best quenching reagent compared with sodium thiosulfate and ammonium sulfate. The use of a classification chemometric technique as soft independent modeling of class analogy before the PLS regression improved the results obtained in the prediction of the total THMs index, lowering the relative standard error of prediction (RSEP) from 11.4% to lower than 6.0%. The results obtained by the proposed HS-MS method were compared with those provided by a conventional chromatographic method after analyzing 20 real drinking water samples. A good agreement in the results was observed and no systematic differences were found, which corroborates the good performance of the proposed method.