Determination of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in oil contaminated soil

Summarization: The detailed determination of the composition of multicomponent hydro-carbon mixtures is a quite complex analytical procedure, which becomes even more tedious when Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAH) are involved. The absence of standardized procedures for the identification and quantitation of the latter is widely recognized. The objective of this work was to estimate the pollution level in the soil recovered from a Greek Refinery. Different soil pretreatment, drying and extrac-tion procedures were applied. Thermal and chemical drying, sonication, mechani-cal shaking, liquid–liquid extraction and solid phase extraction were utilised, among others, for the preconcentration of PAH from soil samples. For the detection of the pollutants, Gas Chromatography–Mass Spec-trometry (GC-MS) was used. An improved method for the rapid estimation of the total oil content in the soil sample was developed using an Infrared (IR) detection technique. Experimental results derived from the above methods are presented. The analytical results which were obtained, indicated that the quantitative determination of the PAH depends strongly on the analytical procedure employed. This procedure should combine information derived from different analytical measurements in order to provide reliable characterization of the samplesPresented on