High Throughput Soil and Water Contamination Testing with Automated SIFT-MS

New Environmental Monitoring Techniques for Organics
Oral Presentation

Prepared by W. Kerr, R. Parthipan, B. Prince, V. Langford
Syft Technologies Ltd, 3 Craft Place, Middleton, Christchurch, Canterbury, 8042, New Zealand


Contact Information: william.kerr@syft.com; 33386701


ABSTRACT

Chemically contaminated soils and waterways remain a significant issue in the USA – a legacy of the massive scale of industrialisation in this country. The cost of comprehensive testing services limits their deployment so there is a great demand for new instrumentation and techniques that can provide this testing at a lower cost.

We present here the use of automated SIFT-MS for soil and water testing. SIFT-MS is a real-time mass spectrometric technique, which when combined with the latest robotic sample handling instrumentation provides extremely high throughput sample analysis. Furthermore the characteristics of SIFT-MS make it applicable to an extremely wide range of polar, non-polar, organic and inorganic contaminants in a single, simple and fast analysis.

Specific cases are presented, which validate this technique for the analysis of BTEX contaminants in soil and a range of polar and non-polar contaminants in water.