Extraction and enrichment of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons by ordered mesoporous carbon reinforced hollow fiber liquid-phase microextraction

A novel microextractio nmethod, ordered mesoporous carbon reinforced hollow fiber liquid-phase microextraction coupled with high-performance liquid chromatography and fluorescence detection, was developed for the determination of some organic pollutants in water samples. Four polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (fluorene, anthracene, fluoranthene, and pyrene) were selected to validate this new method. Main parameters that could influence the extraction efficiency such as extraction time, fiber length, stirring rate, the type of the extraction solvent, pH value, the concentration of ordered mesoporous carbon, and salt effect were optimized. Under the optimal extraction conditions, good linearity was observed in the range of 2-1000 ng/L, with the correlation coefficients of 0.9954-0.9986. The recoveries for the spiked samples were in the range of 88.96-100.17%. The limits of detection of the method were 0.4-4 ng/L. The relative standard deviations varied from 4.2-5.9%. The results demonstrated that the newly developed method was an efficient pretreatment and enrichment procedure for the determination of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in environmental water samples.