Determination of volatile polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in waters using headspace solid-phase microextraction with...

Area of Science:

• Analytical Chemistry
• Materials Science

Background:

• Polymeric ionic liquids (PILs) offer tunable properties for advanced applications.
• Solid-phase microextraction (SPME) is a versatile technique for analyzing environmental contaminants.
• Developing efficient sorbent materials is crucial for sensitive detection of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).

Purpose of the Study:

• To synthesize and characterize a novel benzyl-functionalized crosslinked PIL.
• To evaluate the efficacy of the PIL as a sorbent coating for headspace SPME-GC-FID analysis of PAHs.
• To optimize extraction conditions and assess the method's performance for environmental water samples.

Main Methods:

• Co-polymerization of specific ionic liquid monomers to create a crosslinked PIL.
• Headspace solid-phase microextraction (SPME) using the PIL-coated fiber.
• Gas chromatography (GC) with flame-ionization detection (FID) for PAH quantification.

Main Results:

• The crosslinked PIL fiber demonstrated effective extraction of seven volatile PAHs.
• Optimized conditions included 50°C extraction, 30% NaCl, and 60 min extraction time.
• Linear calibration ranges were 0.02-20 µg/L, with recoveries from 67.2% to 130% and detection limits of 0.01-0.04 µg/L.

Conclusions:

• The developed crosslinked PIL sorbent shows high sensitivity and accuracy for PAH determination in environmental water.
• This novel PIL-based SPME method offers a promising alternative to commercial sorbents for PAH analysis.