Development of sensitive determination method for fungicides from environmental water samples with Titanate nanotube array micro-solid phase extraction prior to high performance liquid chromatography

Fungicides have been widely used throughout the world, and the resulted pollution has absorbed great attention in recent years. Present study described an effective measurement technique for fungicides including thiram, metalaxyl, diethofencarb, myclobutanil and tebuconazole in environmental water samples. A micro-solid phase extraction (mu SPE) was developed utilizing ordered TiO2 nanotube array for determination of target fungicides prior to a high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The experimental results indicated that TiO2 nanotube arrays demonstrated excellent merits on the preconcentration of fungicides, and excellent linear relationship between peak area and the concentration of fungicides was obtained in the range of 0.1-50 mu g L-1. The detection limits for the targeted fungicides were in the range of 0.016-0.086 mu g L-1 (S/N=3). Four real environmental water samples were used to validate the applicability of the proposed method, and good spiked recoveries in the range of 73.9-114% were achieved. A comparison of present method with conventional solid phase extraction was made and the results exhibited that proposed method resulted in better recoveries. The results demonstrated that this mu-SPE technique was a viable alternative for the analysis of fungicides in complex samples. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.