A fast, simple and efficient surface floating organic droplet–based air–assisted liquid–liquid microextraction for simultaneous extraction of multiclass pesticides from environmental water, mineral water and soft drink samples by HPLC–DAD

Abstract

A fast, simple, efficient and selective surface floating organic droplet–based air–assisted liquid–liquid microextraction method coupled with high performance liquid chromatograph–diode array detector was developed for simultaneous extraction of six multiclass pesticides. The developed method was validated for the extraction, enrichment and quantitative determination of trace level multiclass pesticides from environmental water, mineral water and soft drink samples. The effect of experimental parameters such as type and volume of extraction solvent, addition of salt, solution pH and extraction number were successfully optimized. Under the optimum conditions, the method showed good linearity for all the six multiclass pesticide residues with coefficient of determination within the range of 0.9979–0.9994. The limit of detection and quantification were in the range 0.01 to 0.07 µg L−1 and 0.03 to 0.25 µg L−1, respectively. The reproducibility and repeatability study in terms of %RSD were in the range of 0.88–5.28 and 1.35–6.08, respectively, indicating good precision of the method. The method exhibited acceptable mean relative recovery (%RR) in the range of 71.82 to 110.16 % with %RSDs (n = 3) less than 8 % for all the samples. Thus, the developed method could be utilized as selective extraction and preconcentration of multiclass pesticides from environmental water samples, mineral water and soft drink samples, as well as samples with similar matrices.