Simultaneous spectrophotometric determination of trace amount of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in water samples after magnetic solid-phase extraction by using projection pursuit regression

Magnetic solid-phase extraction based on coated nano-magnets Fe₃O₄ was applied for the preconcentration of four polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs; anthracene, phenanthrene, fluorine, and pyrene) in environmental water samples prior to simultaneous spectrophotometric determination using multivariate calibration method. Magnetic nanoparticles, carrying target metals, were easily separated from the aqueous solution by applying an external magnetic field so, no filtration or centrifugation was necessary. After elution of the adsorbed PAHs, the concentration of PAHs was determined spectrophotometrically with the aid of a new and efficient multivariate spectral analysis base on principal component analysis-projection pursuit regression, without separation of analytes. The obtained results revealed that using projection pursuit regression as a flexible modeling approach improves the predictive quality of the developed models compared with partial least squares and least squares support vector machine methods. The method was used to determine four PAHs in environmental water samples.