(SPME) has been popular as an environmentally friendly sample pretreatment technique to extract a very wide range of analytes. This is partly owing to the development of SPME coatings. One of the key factors affecting the extraction performances, such as the sensitivity, selectivity, and reproducibility, is the properties of the coatings on SPME fibers. This paper classifies the materials used as SPME coatings and introduces some common preparation techniques of SPME coating in detail, such as sol-gel technique, electrochemical polymerization technique, particle direct pasting technique, restricted access matrix SPME technique, and molecularly imprinted SPME technique.
IntroductionSolid-phase microextraction (SPME) is a sample preparation technique developed by Pawliszyn et al. (1,2). The process of SPME includes two major operation steps: extraction and desorption. Because both extraction and desorption take place on the coatings, the properties of the coatings determine the performance of SPME. Based on this fact, the development of new coatings has been in great demand for a long time. In recent years, the quantity of papers discussing new coatings for SPME has increased rapidly. In this paper, many of the present coatings are classified, and the common preparation techniques are described in detail.
Discussion The classifying of coatingsIn the book Applications of Solid-Phase Microextraction, Górecki (3) sorted the coatings from Supelco (Bellefonte, PA) into two different categories: high-viscosity liquid coatings and solid coatings. He also described the extraction mechanism for both kinds of coatings, respectively. For liquid coatings, the extraction of analytes is obtained by the absorption, in which the analytes can transfer from the surface of coatings to the inside. This kind of coating includes the common stationary phases polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and polyacrylate (PA). For solid coatings, the extraction of analytes is based on adsorption, in which the analytes may only stay on the surface of the coatings. Some composite coatings such as PDMS-divinylbenzene (DVB), carbowax-DVB, carbowax-templete resin, etc. from Supelco are solid coatings with porous surfaces. They can only extract analytes by adsorption. During the extraction process, the mechanism of adsorption is much more complex than absorption.With the development of the SPME technique, more and more new materials are utilized in the preparation of coatings. More than half of currently available coatings are solid coatings. However, they are divided by the properties of the materials; the solid coatings are multifarious. Based on organic and inorganic types, there are two primary kinds of coatings: organic and inorganic.
Organic coatingOrganic polymer materials are the first kind of material used as SPME coatings. Because traditional SPME fibers utilize fusedsilica fiber as solid-phase carriers, compared with inorganic materials, organic polymer materials are easier to affix with fiber. In addition, at high temperature, the thermal coefficien...