Spindle barium chromate coupled with luminol chemiluminiscence for determining phosphorus and triphenyl phosphate

As one kind of emerging endocrine disruptors, organophosphorus flame retardants (OPFRs) became a potential threat to human health and aroused great concern from researchers. However, the lack of efficient and portable method limited our cognition of OPFRs' time–space distribution in water environment. In this report, a coupling chemiluminescence (CL) technique based on spindle BaCrO4 and luminol was proposed to achieve the detection of trace phosphorus and OPFRs in water samples. Through a series of optimal experiments, temperature, pH, BaCrO4 concentration and reaction time were the considerable factors in this coupling method. Furthermore, the discussion of inner mechanism demonstrated that PO43− performed a stronger binding force with Ba2+ than CrO42−, which was owned to lower solubility product constant of Ba3(PO4)2. Under the optimized conditions, the method presented a good linear relationship in phosphorus concentration range of 1–200 nM. The linear equation was I = 53482.21C + 1458.58 (R2 = 0.9995) and the limit of detection (LOD) was 0.5 nM. Furthermore, this proposed method was also applied to detect triphenyl phosphate (TPP) with excellent analytical performance (I = 116631.5C + 6462.3, R2 = 0.9944, LOD = 0.8 nM). This report not any proposed an efficient strategy for phosphorus' and OPFRs' detection based on sensitive and efficient CL method, but also paved a road for the determination of inert targets and organophosphorus interferon.