Multiwalled carbon nanotubes as adsorbents of solid-phase extraction for determination of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in environmental waters coupled with high-performance liquid chromatography

Multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) were used as a novel kind of solid-phase extraction adsorbents in this work as well as an analytical method based on MWCNTs solid-phase extraction (SPE) combined with high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was established for the determination of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), some of which belong to typical persistent organic pollutants (POPs) owing to their carcinogenicity and endocrine disrupting activity. Several conditions that probably affected the extraction efficiency including the eluent volume, sample flow rate, sample pH and the sample volume were optimized in detail. The characteristic data of analytical performance were determined to investigate the sensitivity and precision of the method, and the method was applied to the determination of PAHs in environmental water samples such as river water sample, tap water sample and wastewater sample from the constructed wetland effluent. The experimental results indicated that there were excellent linear relationship between peak area and the concentration of PAHs over the range of 0.04–100 μg L−1, and the precisions (RSD) were 1.7–4.8% under the optimal conditions. The detection limits of proposed method for the studied PAHs were 0.005–0.058 μg L−1 (S/N = 3). The recoveries of PAHs spiked in environmental water samples ranged from 78.7 to 118.1%. It was concluded that MWCNTs packed cartridge coupled with HPLC was an excellent alternative for the routine analysis of PAHs at trace level.