Chemical characterization of geomembranes by mass spectrometry

Geomembrane is a type of material used in civil engineering and environmental engineering works for the protection and recovery of environment. Five geomembranes commercially obtained from three Brazilian companies were chemically characterized in order to evaluate the chromatographic profile and differentiate them and the results contribute to create a database and evaluate the geomembranes after periods in different applications. The GC/MS technique and multivariate analysis tools were applied. 211 compounds were selected for SVOCs and 59 compounds for VOCs. Considering the 211 compounds, 159 met the p-value criterion < 0.05. For the 159 compounds 130 met the cutoff criterion of 2.0 for the fold change analysis and were considered in the study. Regarding VOCs compounds, of the 59 compounds considered, 25 met the p-value criteria < 0.05 and 15 for the cut-off 2.0 criteria for fold change analysis. The combination of chromatographic determination with multivariate analysis was applied and showed to be an excellent tool for chemical characterization and the differentiation between the five groups can be observed. This information can be useful for use of these techniques in routine for material quality control and for geosynthetics database.