Sensitive determination of As (III) and As (V) by magnetic solid phase extraction with Fe@polyethyleneimine in combination with hydride generation atomic fluorescence spectrometry

Abstract

The magnetic nanomaterial Fe@polyethyleneimine (Fe@PEI) was successfully synthesized and used as an effective adsorbent material for magnetic solid phase extraction(MSPE) of As(III) and As(V) from water samples. Fe@SiO2 nanoparticles were prepared by one pot synthetic method using a borohydride reduction method, then modified with (3-chloropropyl)trimethoxysilane to obtain Fe@SiO2-Cl by chloropropylation, which was reacted with PEI to achieve Fe@polyethyleneimine (Fe@PEI). The microstructure and morphology of Fe@PEI were characterized by transmission electron microscoscopy (TEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The experimental results showed that Fe@PEI demonstrated excellent adsorption for As(III) and As(V). Based on this fact, the determination method for these two arsenic species earned good limits of detection (LODs) of 0.002μgL−1 and wide calibration curves in the concentration range from 0.008 to 0.2μgL−1. The precisions of As (III) and As (V)were 1.95% and 2.55% (RSD, n=6), respectively. The proposed method was validated with real samples and the spiked recoveries were in the range of 82.7–98.3% and the accuracies were in the range of 2–13.3%. The results demonstrated that the developed MSPE method had good advantages such as simplicity, rapid separation, low cost, easy to reuse and high-quality analytical performances, which made it attractive for rapid and efficient extraction of inorganic arsenic species in the environmental water samples.