Dispersive liquid phase micro-extraction of aromatic amines in environmental water samples

Abstract

A new, rapid and sensitive method for the determination of aromatic amines such as o-nitroaniline (NIT), alpha-naphtylamine (NAP), o-chloroaniline (CHL) in environmental water samples was developed with dispersive liquid phase micro-extraction coupled with high performance liquid chromatography. Preliminary experiments indicated that excellent achievements were obtained when chlorobenzene and acetonitrile were employed as the extraction solvent and dispersive solvent, respectively. Some other parameters that would have important effect on the pre-concentration of aromatic amines were investigated in detail. Under the optimal conditions, the method had excellent linear relationship between the peak area and the concentration for NIT, NAP and CHL in the concentration range of 1 ∼ 50 µg L−1. The limits of detection and precisions of the proposed method were in the range of 0.1 ∼ 0.7 µg L−1 and 6.3 ∼ 9.7%, respectively. The proposed method has been validated with two real water samples, and the results showed that excellent spiked recoveries in the range of 92.8% ∼ 111.5% were achieved. All these demonstrated that the proposed method would be very useful and applicable for the determination of such pollutants in the future.