Notice of RetractionOptimization of solid phase extraction for determining steroid estrogens in wastewater by high-performance liquid chromatography

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

The analysis of steroid estrogens (Estrone (E1), 17β-estradiol (E2), and 17α-ethynylestradiol (EE2)) in wastewater samples is a problem of primary concern for quality control due to the toxicity level of these compounds and their public health risk. Solid phase extraction (SPE) was used to enrich and to clean up the aqueous samples and then high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was used to quantify the steroid estrogens. The elution solvent, elution rate, elution volume and flow sample rate have been studied and optimized for extraction procedure in order to achieve the higher SPE recoveries. Results show that the best overall recoveries of the tested steroid estrogens were achieved with acetonitrile elution solvent, 3-4 mL/min elution rate, 10-12 mL elution volume and 7-15 mL/min sampling rate. The optimized extraction procedure was applied to the determination of the steroid estrogens in a real wastewater treatment plant. Results show that E1, E2 and EE2 were all detected in the influent and effluent samples. The removal efficiencies of which were averaged at 72.9%, 76.2% and 76.6%, respectively.