Sensitive determination of polybrominated diphenyl ethers in environmental water samples with etched stainless steel wire based on solid-phase microextraction prior to gas chromatography-mass spectrometry

Abstract

Solid-phase microextraction (SPME) is a solvent-free sample pretreatment technique and has attracted great attention in many application fields. The potential of etched stainless steel wire as SPME adsorbent for the enrichment of organic pollutants has been investigated in recent years. The goal of this work was to investigate the feasibility of using etched stainless steel wire as SPME adsorbents to enrich polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) at trace levels, which are new typical persistent organic pollutants in the environment. Extraction conditions that maybe influence the extraction efficiency such as extraction time, agitation speed, ionic strength, and desorption conditions were investigated and optimized in detail. The experimental results exhibited the good linear relationship over the range of 1–200 ng L⁻¹, and the precisions were 5.2–9.5% under the optimal conditions. The limits of detection could reach 0.2–0.6 ng L⁻¹. Satisfactory results were obtained when the present method was applied to determine the seven PBDEs in real world water samples with the recoveries over the range of 77–118%. All these results indicated that etched stainless steel wire as SPME adsorbents coupled to gas chromatography-negative chemical ionization mass spectrometry (GC-NCI-MS) was an excellent method for the rapid analysis of PBDEs at trace levels in the environment.