Graphene oxide–polyaniline nanocomposite as a potential sorbent for dispersive solid-phase extraction and determination of selected pharmaceutical and personal care products in wastewater samples using HPLC with a diode-array detector

Abstract

We report the use of a graphene oxide–polyaniline nanocomposite as a novel sorbent for the dispersive solid-phase extraction of six pharmaceutical and personal care products in complex wastewater matrices. The extracted samples were analyzed using high-performance liquid chromatography with diode-array detection. Extraction parameters, such as the sorbent mass, desorption time, and desorption solvent composition and volume, were screened by full factorial design and optimized using a Box–Behnken design. The developed method was successfully applied to the determination of most of the selected pollutants in wastewater samples with acceptable recovery and precision taking into account the complexity of the analytical problem. As a result of the co-elution of some matrix constituents with two analytes (carbamazepine and diclofenac) in real samples, a multivariate curve resolution-alternating least-squares method was adopted as a tool for the accurate determination of these compounds through modeling the multivariate chromatographic data. The recoveries of the optimized procedure for the proposed analytes were in the range 74–120% for most of the samples and the calculated values of the limit of detection ranged between 0.05 and 1.8 μg L⁻¹.