Comparison of Pretreatment Methods for the Analysis of PCBs in Transformer Oil

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Research article

Journal of the Korean Society for Environmental Analysis 2010;13(3):173-179.

폐변압기 절연유 중 PCBs 분석을 위한 전처리 방법 비교

최용석¹, 윤중섭¹, 엄석원¹, 김민영¹, 안승구²

¹서울시보건환경연구원
²서울시립대학교

Abstract

Transformer oil is usually a highly-refined mineral oil that is stable at high temperatures and has an excellent electrical insulating property. Polychlorinated biphenyls(PCBs) had been widely used as transformer oil before the use of PCBs was banned throughout world in 1970s. Therefore PCBs is not used as transformer oil or insulating oil any more, but sometimes they have been found in transformer oil. It is difficult to separate and quantify PCBs in transformer oil because chemo-physical characteristics between PCBs and transformer oil are very similar. Lately, various solid phase extraction(SPE) methods are adopted for rapid and simple separation of PCBs but it is still hard to perfectly extract PCBs from transformer oil and loss during this extraction/cleanup process can cause a recovery problem. The aim of this study is to find an easy method for PCBs determination in transformer oil and to verify its efficiency. We applied various pretreatment methods to extract PCBs determination in transformer oil and compared with their efficiencies: laborious treatment including sulfur treatment,multilayer silica gel column and so forth, SPE method and simple treatment such as just dilution of transformer oil. For the majority of transformer oils with few impurities, large differences of PCBs between methods could not be found.

Key Words: transformer oil, PCBs, determination, method