Ionic liquid/ionic liquid dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction

In this article, a novel and simple microextraction method, termed ionic liquid/ionic liquid dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction (IL/IL-DLLME), has been designed and developed for the rapid enrichment and analysis of environmental pollutants. Instead of using hazardous organic solvents, two kinds of ILs, hydrophobic IL and hydrophilic IL, were used as extraction solvent and disperser solvent in IL/IL-DLLME step, respectively. Permethrin and biphenthrin, two of the often-used pyrethroid pesticides, were used as model compounds. Factors that may affect the enrichment efficiencies were investigated and optimized in detail. Under optimum conditions, permethrin and biphenthrin exhibited a wide linear relationship over the range 1-100 μg/L. For permethrin and biphenthrin, the precisions were 4.65-7.78%, and limits of detection were found to be 0.28 and 0.83 μg/L, respectively. Satisfactory results were achieved when the present method was applied to analyze the target compounds in real-world water samples with spiked recoveries over the range 84.1-113.5%. All these facts indicated that IL/IL-DLLME is a simple and rapid alternative for the enrichment and analysis of environmental pollutants and will have a wide application perspective in the future.