Hollow fiber supported ionic liquid membrane microextraction for determination of sulfonamides in environmental water samples by high-performance liquid chromatography

By using ionic liquid as membrane liquid and tri-n-octylphosphine oxide (TOPO) as additive, hollow fiber supported liquid phase microextraction (HF-LPME) was developed for the determination of five sulfonamides in environmental water samples by high-performance liquid chromatography with ultraviolet detection The extraction solvent and the parameters affecting the extraction enrichment factor such as the type and amount of carrier, pH and volume ratio of donor phase and acceptor phase, extraction time, salt-out effect and matrix effect were optimized. Under the optimal extraction conditions (organic liquid membrane phase: [C8MIM][PF6] with 14% TOPO (w/v); donor phase: 4 mL, pH 4.5 KH2PO4 with 2 M Na2SO4; acceptor phase: 25 μL, pH 13 NaOH; extraction time: 8 h), low detection limits (0.1–0.4 μg/L, RSD ≤ 5%) and good linear range (1–2000 ng/mL, R2 ≥ 0.999) were obtained for all the analytes. The presence of humic acid (0–25 mg/L dissolved organic carbon) and bovine serum albumin (0–100 μg/mL) had no significant effect on the extraction efficiency. Good spike recoveries over the range of 82.2–103.2% were obtained when applying the proposed method on five real environmental water samples. These results indicated that this present method was very sensitive and reliable with good repeatabilities and excellent clean-up in water samples. The proposed method confirmed hollow fiber supported ionic liquid membrane based LPME to be robust to monitoring trace levels of sulfadiazine, sulfamerazine, sulfamethazine, sulfadimethoxine and sulfamethoxazole in aqueous samples.