Development of magnetic graphene @hydrophilic polydopamine for the enrichment and analysis of phthalates in environmental water samples

Magnetic graphene @hydrophilic polydopamine composites were successfully fabricated via a simple solvothermal reaction and self-polymerization of dopamine. Benefit from the excellent characteristics of strong magnetic responsivity, super-hydrophilicity and abundant pi-electron system, the prepared material showed great potential as a magnetic solid phase extraction (MSPE) sorbent. In this work, six kinds of phthalates ( PAEs) were selected as the target analytes to evaluate the extraction ability of the adsorbents combined with MSPE-GC-MS. And various extraction parameters were optimized by selecting the pH value of samples, the amount of sorbents, adsorption and desorption time, the type and volume of eluting solution. Meanwhile, the whole extraction process could be finished in 30 min. Under the optimized conditions, validations of the method were evaluated as well. And the results presented excellent linearity with a wide range of 50-20,000 mu g/L (R-2 > 0.9991). The detection of limits were in the range from 0.05-5 mu g/L (S/N=3). Therefore, the novel magnetic graphene@polydopamine composites were successfully used as the sorbents for the enrichment and analysis of PAEs in real water samples. This proposed method provided a simple, efficient and sensitive approach for the determination of aromatic compounds in real environmental samples. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.