Electrospun acrylonitrile butadiene styrene nanofiber film as an efficient nanosorbent for head space thin film microextraction of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from water and urine samples

Abstract

In the present study, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) nanofiber film was fabricated on the aluminum foil via a one-step and facile electrospinning strategy. Thereafter, the fabricated film was utilized as a novel and efficient nanosorbent for headspace thin film microextraction (HS-TFME) of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Some properties of the prepared nanofiber film like morphology, chemical structure, stability, wettability, and extraction efficiency were investigated systematically. The fabricated nanofiber films showed a large ratio of surface to volume, high stability, good hydrophobicity and porous fibrous structure; hence an excellent extraction performance has been achieved. The π-π and hydrophobic interactions play crucial roles in the tendency of PAHs towards fabricated nanosorbent. The effective parameters on the adsorption performance of the developed headspace thin film microextraction-gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy (HS-TFME-GC-MS) method were optimized. At the optimized conditions of the proposed method, a broad linearity range with high coefficient of determination (R2≥0.998) was obtained and the limit of detections (LODs) were in the range of 0.08–0.2 ng mL−1 for six PAHs. The developed HS-TFME-GC-MS method has been applied for the measurement of PAHs in drinking and industrial water samples and urine samples of a smoker and also a non-smoker with satisfactory recoveries in the range of 83–98%, with relative standard deviations (RSDs) lower than 8.8%. The proposed HS-TFME-GC-MS method demonstrated to be a sensitive, efficient, uncomplicated, cost-effective and rapid approach, which can be introduced to analyze trace amounts of PAHs in various samples.