Simultaneous determination of seven phthalic acid esters in beverages using ultrasound and vortex-assisted dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction followed by high-performance liquid chromatography

A sensitive, rapid, and simple high-performance liquid chromatography with UV detection method was developed for the simultaneous determination of seven phthalic acid esters (dimethyl phthalate, dipropyl phthalate, di-n-butyl phthalate, benzyl butyl phthalate, dicyclohexyl phthalate, di-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate, and di-n-octyl phthalate) in several kinds of beverage samples. Ultrasound and vortex-assisted dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction method was used. The separation was performed using an Intersil ODS-3 column (C-18, 250 x 4.6 mm, 5.0 mu m) and a gradient elution with a mobile phase consisting of MeOH/ACN (50: 50) and 0.2 M KH2PO4 buffer. Analytes were detected by a UV detector at 230 nm. The developed method was validated in terms of linearity, limit of detection, limit of quantification, repeatability, accuracy, and recovery. Calibration equations and correlation coefficients (>0.99) were calculated by least squares method with weighting factor. The limit of detection and quantification were in the range of 0.019-0.208 and 0.072-0.483 mu g/L. The repeatability and intermediate precision were determined in terms of relative standard deviation to be within 0.03-3.93 and 0.02-4.74%, respectively. The accuracy was found to be in the range of -14.55 to 15.57% in terms of relative error. Seventeen different beverage samples in plastic bottles were successfully analyzed, and ten of them were found to be contaminated by different phthalic acid esters.