Dispersive Liquid - Liquid Micro extraction Technique Coupled with High Performance Liquid Chromatography Diode Array Detector for the Determination of Sulfonamides in Water Samples

Abstract

A dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction combined with high-performance liquid chromatography with diode array detection (DLLME-HPLC-DAD) has been developed for the determination of 15 sulfonamides in water samples. The effects of experimental parameters on the performance of the method such as the type and volume of extraction and disperser solvents, pH of the solution, effect of salt, and centrifugation time were evaluated, and optimum conditions were established. Under these optimum conditions, linearity was found in the range of 2 - 1 000 μg L-1 with regression coefficients better than 0.9990. The limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ) values were in the range of 0.6 - 7.8 μg L-1 and 1.5 - 8.3 µg L-1, respectively. Intra-day and inter-day precision ranged from 1.5 - 9.7% and from 3.1 - 9.9%, respectively. The accuracy of the method were also evaluated in samples from three different sources of water (river water, groundwater, and tap water) were found to range from 70.5 to 103.9% with %RSD values ranging from 0.5 to 9.8%, with the exception of sulfaguanidine in river water and groundwater where the percentage recovery ranged from 54.3 - 84.9% at the two higher concentration levels (100 and 400 µg L-1).Furthermore, the effect of sample matrix on the extraction of target compounds was evaluated using the relative recovery (%RR) of the samples from three different water sources relative to the ultrahigh purity (UHP) water sample spiked with target analytes, and found in the range of 70.3 - 106.1%.The proposed method was successfully applied to wastewater treatment plant samples and Sulfisoxazole (SSO) was detected in the influent samples in the range of 14.8 - 17.8 µg L-1 with corresponding %RSD, (n = 5) value of 1.6% to 1.9%.The results indicated that the proposed method is effective for the extraction and determination of the sulfonamides in water samples.