A new nitrogen-containing carbon nanoparticle coated stainless steel fiber for selective solid-phase microextraction of ultraviolet filters

Abstract

A new nitrogen-containing carbon nanoparticle (N-CNP) coated fiber was developed for solid phase microextraction (SPME) with direct electrodeposition of a polyaniline coating on etched stainless steel wire using a potentiostatic technique followed by carbonization at 500 °C under a nitrogen atmosphere. The extraction performance of the N-CNP coating was investigated towards polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), ultraviolet (UV) filters and phthalate acid esters (PAEs) in water samples coupled to high performance liquid chromatography with UV detection (HPLC-UV). This N-CNP coating shows excellent selectivity for UV filters compared to that for PAHs and PAEs. Under optimized conditions, the linearity of UV filters was in the range of 0.02–200 μg L⁻¹ with a corresponding correlation coefficient of 0.9921–0.9993. The recoveries ranged from 89.2% to 119%. The relative standard deviations of a single fiber were between 4.83% and 7.82% (n = 5) and fiber-to-fiber were between 7.94% and 10.14% (S/N = 3). Their limits of detection and the limits of quantitation ranged from 0.006–0.203 μg L⁻¹ and 0.02–0.67 μg L⁻¹, respectively. The proposed SPME-HPLC-UV procedure was successfully used for the selective concentration and sensitive determination of UV filters in environmental water samples. Furthermore, this new robust fiber was easily prepared in a reproducible manner.