SiO2-coated magnetic graphene oxide modified with polypyrrole-polythiophene: A novel and efficient nanocomposite for solid phase extraction of trace amounts of heavy metals

The synthesis of a novel nanocomposite comprised of SiO2-coated magnetic graphene oxide modified with a pyrrole-thiophene (mGO/SiO2@coPPy-Th) copolymer is reported in the present work. The nanocomposite was applied for the fast magnetic solid phase extraction (MSPE) of trace levels of copper, lead, chromium, zinc and cadmium from water and agricultural samples. The nanocomposite was prepared in three steps: (1) decoration of graphene oxide sheets with magnetite nanoparticles thorough a facile one-step chemical reaction strategy; (2) chemical grafting by a silica layer to obtain high stability in acidic solutions; and (3) surface modification by coPPy-Th via simultaneous oxidation polymerization of pyrrole and thiophene in the presence of mGO/SiO2 composite. The nanocomposite was subsequently characterized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) and vibrating sample magnetometly (VSM) techniques. Several important experimental variables that could affect MSPE performance, including the pH of the sample, sorption time, sorbent dosage, eluent type and its concentration, eluent volume and elution time, were investigated and optimized. Under optimal conditions, the limits of detection for the target heavy metals ranged from 0.15 to 0.65 mu g L-1. The maximum sorption capacity of the mGO/SiO2@coPPy-Th nanocomposite was 201, 230, 125, 98 and 80 mg g(-1) for Cu(II), Pb(II), Zn(II), Cr(III) and Cd(II), respectively. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed method was investigated for the extraction and determination of the target metals from real matrices.