Multi-walled carbon nanotubes packed cartridge for the solid-phase extraction of several phthalate esters from water samples and their determination by high performance liquid chromatography

Abstract

Being suspected to have carcinogenic and estrogenic properties, the determination of phthalate esters in various environmental samples is very important for environmental risk assessment. In the present paper, a new solid-phase extraction system for HPLC determination of di-ethyl-phthalate, di-n-propyl-phthalate, di-iso-butyl-phthalate, and di-cyclohexyl-phthalate was developed. The four analytes were quantitatively adsorbed on multi-walled carbon nanotubes packed cartridge, then the analytes were quantitatively desorbed with acetonitrile, finally the analytes in acetonitrile eluate were determined by HPLC. Parameters influencing the extraction efficiency such as volume of sample solutions and eluent volume, were examined. Under the optimized conditions, detection limits of 0.18-0.86 ng ml −1 were achieved for four phthalate esters. The proposed method had been used to determine the four phthalate esters in tap water, river water, and sea water samples. No phthalate esters were found in the river water and sea water samples. For the case of tap water sample, di-ethyl-phthalate, di-n-propyl-phthalate, and di-cyclohexyl-phthalate were not found, only 2.0 ng ml −1 of di-iso-butyl-phthalate was found. The accuracy of the proposed method was tested by recovery measurements on spiked samples, the recoveries of 80.3-104.5% were obtained in most cases.

Analysis of phthalate esters contamination in drinking water samples

“…Phthalate esters are widely use as additives in the manufacture of plastics, paint and cosmetics (Cai et al, 2003;Penalver et al, 2000) to increase their flexibility, transparency, durability and longevity. Most phthalate esters are used in the manufacturing of polyvinyl chloride (PVC).…”

Barium alginate caged Fe3O4@C18 magnetic nanoparticles for the pre-concentration of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and phthalate esters from environmental water samples

“…Nanomaterials, which possess nanosized diameter and large surface area, are being applied in numerous scientific fields [1][2][3][4]. In this regard many research groups have developed various types of nanosized SPE sorbents [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Compared with traditional SPE ones, these nanosized sorbents have high extraction efficiency with rapid extraction dynamics performance.…”

Analysis of phthalates via HPLC-UV in environmental water samples after concentration by solid-phase extraction using ionic liquid mixed hemimicelles

“…Several analytical methods have been developed for determining PAEs by gas chromatography (GC) [7,8], high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) [9,10] using different preconcentration techniques such as liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) [11], solid-phase microextraction (SPME) [12,13] and solid-phase extraction (SPE) [14][15][16][17] in several types of matrices. Among above-mentioned sample pretreatment procedures, solid-phase extraction based on different types of sorbents such as C 8 [15], organic polymers [16] was widely used.…”