Abstract: | Pentachlorophenol (PCP) was extracted from leather with supercritical carbon dioxide and in situ acetylated under static SFE conditions in the presence of triethylamine. During the dynamic extraction step, the derivatives were removed from the matrix and collected with either a pure liquid (light petroleum) or a liquid-solid (light petroleum-solid sorbent (C18, alumina, Florisil or Celite)) trap. To prevent restrictor plugging, a suitable restrictor was designed. The clean-up of the extracts was optimized in this study. Different internal standards were tested and it was shown that not all of them were usable. The SFE results were compared with those obtained by Soxhlet extraction with methanol. With SFE instead of conventional Soxhlet extraction, the overall time required for determination of PCP in leather can be reduced from about 2 days to approx. 3 hours. |