Hard Cap Espresso Machines in Analytical Chemistry: What Else?

A hard cap espresso machine has been used in combination with liquid chromatography with molecular fluorescence detection for the determination of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from contaminated soils and sediments providing appropriate extraction efficiencies and quantitative results. Naphthalene, acenaphthene, fluorene, phenanthrene, anthracene, fluoranthene, pyrene, benz[a]anthracene, chrysene, benz[b]fluoranthene, benz[k]fluoranthene, benz[a]pyrene, dibenz[a,h]anthracene, benz[ghi]perylene, and indeno[1,2,3-cd]pyrene were used as target compounds. It should be mentioned that the pairs benz[a]anthracene-chrysene and dibenz[a,h]anthracene-benz[ghi]perylene peaks coelute under the employed chromatographic conditions; thus, those compounds were determined together. PAHs were extracted from 5.0 g of soil, previously homogenized, freeze-dried, and sieved to 250 μm, with 50 mL of 40% (v/v) acetonitrile in water at a temperature of 72 ± 3 °C. The proposed procedure is really fast, with an extraction time of 11 s, and it reduces the required amount of organic solvent to do the sample preparation. The obtained limit of detection for the evaluated PAHs was from 1 to 38 μg kg(-1). Recoveries were calculated using clean soils spiked with 100, 500, 1000, and 2000 μg kg(-1) PAHs with values ranging from 81 to 121% and good precision with relative standard deviation values lower than 30%. The method was validated using soil and sediment certified reference materials and also using real samples by comparison with ultrasound-assisted extraction, as reference methodology, obtaining statistically comparable results. Thus, the use of hard cap espresso machines in the analytical laboratories offers tremendous possibilities as low cost extraction units for the extraction of solid samples.