from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
There is an enormous scientific effort devoted to environmental problems solutions based on new and nanostructured materials. Our study follows this trend and contributes to the green analytical chemistry approach. Specifically, it further develops the idea of using nanofibrous sorbents for solid phase microextraction (SPME) as a green technique of pollutant determination.Nanofibres of polyethersulfone (PES) were successfully prepared by needle electrospinning and fixed on a steel wire SPME assmebly. The basic properties of the prepared nanofibres were determined by thermogravimetry (TGA) and scanning electron microscope (SEM). Analytical performance of prepared fibres was compared with common commercially available SPME fibre - 100 µm polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) in the headspace SPME (HS-SPME) mode of gas chromatograph coupled with tandem mass spectrometer (GC/MSMS). Headspace solid phase microextraction (HS-SPME) is a modern analytical technique for sample introduction into gas chromatographic systems. The HS-SPME technique combines extractive sorption (enrichment) of targets to be quantified with ongoing thermal desorption and injection to the GC system.Obsolete organochlorinated pesticides (OCP) as HCH, DDT, chlordane, heptachlor, endosulfan, endrin and their transformation products were selected as model analytes in water matrix. With these pollutants, a set of experiments was conducted to proof the effect of key SPME method conditions: extraction time, extraction temperature and sample salinity on OCP MSMS response. PES-nanofibers based SPME assembly prototype comes out to be quite comparable with PDMS fibres under low-salinity conditions and it behaves as expected. Longer extraction times and higher extraction temperatures give higher OCP MSMS response. Even if PDMS fibre performed significantly better for HCH isomers under high salinity conditions, nanofibrous SPME geometry deserves further research as it brings promisingly sensitive OCP MSMS response.
Keywords: Solid phase microextraction, organochlorinated pesticides, electrospun, nanofibres, polyethersulfone, salting out, extraction time, extraction temperature© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.