Evaluating the blank contamination and recovery of sample pretreatment procedures for analyzing organophosphorus flame retardants in waters

Organophosphate esters（OPEs）, used as flame retardants and plasticizers, are widely present in environmental waters. Development of accurate determination methods for trace OPEs in water is urgent for understanding the fate and risk of this class of emerging pollutants. However, the wide use of OPEs in experimental materials results in blank interference, which influences the accuracy of analytical results. In the present work, blank contamination and recovery of pretreatment procedures for analysis of OPEs in water samples were systematically examined for the first time. Blank contaminations were observed in filtration membranes, glass bottles, solid phase extraction cartridges, and nitrogen blowing instruments. These contaminations could be as high as 6.4–64 ng/L per treatment. Different kinds of membranes were compared in terms of contamination levels left after common glassware cleaning, and a special wash procedure was proposed to eliminate the contamination from membranes. Meanwhile, adsorption of highly hydrophobic OPEs on the inside wall of glass bottles was found to be 42.4%–86.1%, which was the primary cause of low recoveries and was significantly reduced by an additional washing step with acetonitrile. This work is expected to provide guidelines for the establishment of analysis methods for OPEs in aqueous samples.

Springback behavior of tailor rolled blank in U-shape forming

The springback of tailor rolled blanks with quenching and partitioning steels was investigated.In order to find out the springback behavior and related influence factors for the novel sheets,both experimental and simulation methods have been used to compare and analyze the springback characteristics of equal thickness blanks and tailor rolled blanks in U-channel forming.From the results,the overall springback angles of tailor rolled blanks at thin and thick sides are respectively 106.79° and 99.705°,which are both lower than those of the corresponding equal thickness blanks.Due to the existence of the thickness transition zone,the stress distribution in thin and thick sides of blanks is changed.The location of dangerous region in thin side of tailor rolled blanks is closer to the end of side,and the thick side moved to the middle of straight wall,which are different with the equal thickness blanks.Afterwards,the released quantitles of tangential stress and strain per unit section of blank are adopted to calculate relative springback angles and give novel evaluation criteria for qualitatively analyzing the amount of springback angles.By comparing the results,it shows that the tangential strain method is more suitable for the actual situation.