Preparation and characterisation of photoresponsive molecularly imprinting polymer nanoparticles with hollow structure for extraction and enrichment of dibutyl phthalate

Abstract

Dibutyl phthalate (DBP), as a plasticizer, has been widely used in the manufacture of plastic products. However, it is generally acknowledged that DBP is an endocrine disruptor, which would cause harm to both humans and wildlife. Generally, trace DBP in river water, soil or food is hard to be detected accurately. To solve this case, a core-shell hollow structured molecularly imprinting polymer, PH-MIPs, was synthesised via surface imprinting technology. It is noteworthy that the prepared PH-MIPs can specifically absorb and release DBP irradiated by different wavelengths of light. More importantly, the absorption capacity of PH-MIPs reaches up to 5.2 mg·g−1 without obvious attenuation in absorption performance after 4 loops of photo-controlled uptake and release of DBP. Furthermore, the PH-MIPs exhibit excellent selective absorption properties, supported by an imprinting factor of 3.4. Finally, the prepared PH-MIPs were applied to enrich and extract DBP in river water samples with the recovery rate of 83.2%. In general, the proposed PH-MIPs exhibit excellent practicability, which offers a method for the content determination of DBP as a high-efficiency solid-phase extractant for the enrichment and extraction of target pollutants.