A novel chemometric coupling technique combined with HPLC-DAD for rapid quantification and source apportionment of monoaromatic hydrocarbons in soil samples

In the contribution, a novel chemometric coupling technique combined with high-performance liquid chromatography with diode array detector (HPLC-DAD) was developed for the rapid quantification and source apportionment of eight monoaromatic hydrocarbons (MACHs) in soil samples. The strategy was built on the three-dimensional calibration based on alternating trilinear decomposition coupling with the unsupervised classification using t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (named ATLD-t-SNE). Firstly, a validation set and a spiked soil set were used to investigate the quantitative performance of the developed method. The obtained average recoveries of eight MACHs in soil samples were between (95.0 ± 4.4)% and (111.9 ± 3.3)%, and the limits of detection ranged from 0.0041μg mL −1 to 1.85 μg mL −1 , which were better than the results of parallel factor analysis-alternating least squares (PARAFAC-ALS). Subsequently, the proposed approach was applied to analyze actual soil samples collected from tea plantations (7 samples) and industrial areas (60 samples), revealing the presence of ethylbenzene (EBZ) and (1,3,5)-trimethylbenzene (MTY) in both types of soil samples, could the absence of other six MACHs. Finally, ATLD-t-SNE was utilized to classify these soil samples and a comparison between the new strategy and ATLD combined with feature component analysis as well as principal component analysis (called ATLD-FCA and ATLD-PCA, respectively) was made. The finding indicated that ATLD-t-SNE provided better clustering than other two methods, indicating different sources of organic pollution of MACHs in soil samples.