Determination of chloroacetic acids in drinking water using suppressed ion chromatography with solid-phase extraction

Suppressed ion chromatography with a conductivity detector was developed for the determination of trace amounts of underivatized chloroacetic acids (CAAs). When sodium carbonate and methanol were used as a mobile phase, the simultaneous determination of each CAA took approximately 25 min. The linearity, reproducibility and detection limits were determined for the proposed method. For the solid-phase extraction step, the effects of the pH of the sample solution, sample volume and the eluting agent were tested. Under the optimized extracting conditions, the average recoveries for CAAs spiked in tap water were 83-107%, with an optimal preconcentration factor of 20. The reproducibility of recovery rate for CAAs was 1.2-3.8%, based upon 6 repetitions of the recovery experiments.