Novel fabricated silver particles/polypyrrole printed circuit board passive samplers for volatile organic compounds monitoring

A simple fabricated silver particles/polypyrrole printed circuit board (PCB) was successfully developed as a passive sampler for the monitoring of the volatile organic compounds, xylene and styrene. The surface morphology of the PCB passive sampler was investigated by SEM, and a cauliflower-like structure with large surface area was obtained. After sampling, the adsorbed analytes were easily desorbed by laboratory-built thermal desorption device coupled with an on-line micro-preconcentrator and analyzed by GC-FID. Under optimum conditions, a wide linear dynamic range (0.002-10.849 ng for xylene and 0.002-10.643 ng for styrene with R-2>0.99) was obtained with a low limit of detection (0.65 and 0.64 pg for xylene and styrene, respectively) and a low limit of quantitation (2.00 pg for both compounds). The developed PCB passive samplers provided a good sampler-to-sampler reproducibility with a %RSD of less than 8%, a 2 weeks storage stability, a four times reusability with a %RSD of less than 10% and an especially low cost of only 0.25 USD per sampling. The obtained results were comparable to those using a commercial passive sampler. The developed passive samplers were used to monitor xylene and styrene at two copy-print shops in Hat Yai, Songkhla, Thailand. It was found that only xylene was found in the copy-print room ranging from N.D. to (3.0 +/- 0.1) ppbV. In addition, a personal exposure was also monitored and only xylene (1.4-3.4 ppbV) was also detected. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.