Determination of triazine herbicides in environmental water samples by high-performance liquid chromatography using graphene-coated magnetic nanoparticles as adsorbent

In this paper, a graphene-based Fe3O4 magnetic nanoparticles (G-Fe3O4 MNPs) was used as the adsorbent for the magnetic solid-phase extraction of some triazine herbicides (atrazine, prometon, propazine and prometryn) in environmental water samples followed by high performance liquid chromatography-diode array detection (HPLC-DAD). After the extraction, the adsorbent can be conveniently separated from the aqueous samples by an external magnet. The main factors influencing the extraction efficiency including the amount of the MNPs, the extraction time, the pH of sample solution, and desorption conditions were studied and optimized. Under the optimized experimental conditions, a good linearity was observed in the range of 0.1-50.0 ng mL(-1) for all the analytes, with the correlation coefficients (r) ranging from 0.9996 to 0.9999. The limits of detection of the method ranged between 0.025 and 0.040 ng mL(-1). Good reproducibility was obtained with the relative standard deviations below 5.2%. The developed method was applied to the analysis of the triazine herbicides in different water samples (lake, river and reservoir). The recoveries of the method were in the range between 89.0% and 96.2%. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.