New Trends in Chemical Analysis of Disinfection By-Products

Abstract

The disinfection by-products are special category of emergent pollutants, and their formation is widely known when the organic matter present in the catchment water reaches the disinfection agent in the water treatment plants. These kinds of compounds are close to more than 500 molecules classified in the following main families: halomethanes, haloacetic acids, haloacetonitriles and haloketones. Their adverse effects in the health are widely recognized for international health organisms and normally are in trace levels that promote the development of smart strategies for their analysis in aquatic environments where these compounds are generally not alone. In this way, the microextraction techniques for analysis of emergent contaminants in the environment which are in trace amounts have gained a lot of space because they comply fully with the objectives established in the sample preparation field: reduction in the number of steps, adaptability to field sampling, automation and reduction or total elimination of solvents required for extraction by meeting in one step the main tasks of any sample preparation technique: extraction, clean up and enrichment. There are a lot of possibilities in this field: solid phase microextraction (SPME), liquid phase microextraction (LPME), stir bar sorptive extraction (SBSE) and rotating disk sorptive extraction (RDSE).