Characterization of volatile effluents of livestock buildings by solid-phase microextraction

This article presents two examples of the application of SPME to the characterisation of gaseous effluents from animal sheds. In the first example the volatile fraction of swine manure was analysed by solid-phase microextraction combined with gas-phase chromatography-mass spectrometry (SPME-GC-MS). To find the best extraction conditions for volatile components, six types of SPME fibre were tested. Carboxen-PDMS fibre performed best, enabling us to extract and identify 101 compounds of varying polarity and molecular weight. The second example shows that it is possible to concentrate the volatile components in various animal shed atmospheres by simple exposure of a fibre inside the building. Direct injection into a mass spectrometer ionisation source (SPME-MS) of the volatile components thus trapped provided signatures characteristic of the four different animal shed atmospheres studied. The practical simplicity of the SPME-MS method makes it a good candidate for rapid identification and monitoring of animal shed atmospheres.