Development of an adapted version of polar organic chemical integrative samplers (POCIS-Nylon).

POCIS (polar organic chemical integrative samplers) are increasingly used for sampling polar compounds. Although very efficient for a wide range of pollutants, the classic configuration of the device has a number of limitations, in particular for the sampling of highly polar analytes and hydrophobic compounds. This study presents a new version of the POCIS passive sampler which uses a highly porous Nylon membrane of 30 μm pore size, enabling the sampling of hydrophobic pollutants and improving the accumulation rate of other pollutants. This newly designed tool and the classic POCIS were both tested during a laboratory experiment to evaluate the accumulation kinetics of a selection of pesticides and pharmaceuticals. The observed results show unexpected accumulation kinetics for the new version of POCIS. To explain the data, the use of an intraparticulate diffusion model was required, which also enabled us to propose another explanation of the burst effect observed with the classic POCIS, primarily related to the potential wetting of the device as the first step in the accumulation of compounds.