Simple and commercial readily-available approach for the direct use of ionic liquid-based single-drop microextraction prior to gas chromatography Determination of chlorobenzenes in real water samples as model analytical application

A simple and commercial readily-available approach that enables the direct use of ionic liquid (IL)-based single-drop microextraction (SDME) prior to gas chromatography (GC) is presented. The approach is based on thermal desorption (TD) of the analytes from the IL droplet to the GC system, by using a robust and commercially-available thermodesorption system. For this purpose, a two-glass-tube concentrically disposed system was designed. The inner tube is a laboratory-cut Pyrex tube (20 mm length) that houses the ionic liquid droplet from the SDME process, and the outer tube is a commercially-available TD glass tube (187 mm length) commonly employed for stir-bar sorptive extractions (SBSE). In this way, the proposed device prevents IL from entering the GC system, as this could dirty the inlet or even block the column. The determination of 10 chlorobenzenes in water samples by GC coupled with mass spectrometric(MS) detection has been chosen as model analytical application, showing the feasibility of the proposed approach. The SDME process consists of a 5 p,L droplet of 1-hexyl-3-methylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate ([C6MIM][PF6]) suspended in the headspace (HS) of a 10mL stirred sample. After extracting for 37 min at room temperature, the IL droplet is directly placed into the small inner tube, which is placed into the TD tube. The whole device is placed inside the TD unit, where desorption of the analytes is performed at 240 degrees C for 5 min with a helium flow rate of 100 mL min(-1). The analytical figures of merit of the proposed IL-(HS)-SDME-TD-GC-MS approach are very suitable for the determination of chlorobenzenes at ultratrace levels, with relative standard deviation values ranging between 2% and 17%, and limits of detection ranging between 1 and 4 ng L-1, showing the potential offered by the IL-based SDME process with GC. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.