Enrichment and sensitive determination of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane and its metabolites with temperature controlled ionic liquid dispersive liquid phase microextraction prior to high performance liquid phase chromatography

Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and its main metabolites are important environmental pollutants and have been in the focusing center. It is of great value to develop simple, rapid, sensitive and easy to operate method for monitoring them. Present work established a novel temperature controlled ionic liquid dispersive liquid phase microextraction method in combination with high performance liquid chromatography for the enrichment and determination of DDT and its metabolites. Proposed method used only ionic liquid 1-hexyl-3-methylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate ([C6MIM][PF6]) for the enrichment and overcame the demerits of conventional single drop liquid phase microextraction and dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction. Temperature has two functions here, one is to promote the dispersing of ionic liquid into the solution and forming infinitesimal micro-drop and increasing the chance of the analytes extracted into ionic liquid phase, and the other one is to perform phase-separation. A series of factors that would affect the extraction performance was systematically investigated and optimized. The experimental results indicated that the detection limits obtained for p,p'-DDD, p,p'-DDT, o,p'-DDT and p,p'-DDE were 0.24, 0.24, 0.45, 0.24 ng mL(-1), respectively. The linear ranges for them were from 1.0 to 100 ng mL-1, and the precisions were between 3.8% and 6.7% (n = 6). The proposed method was validated with four real-world samples and excellent results were achieved. (C) 2009 Elsevier BY. All rights reserved.