Evaluation of intercalated α-zirconium phosphate as sorbent in separation and detection of sulfonamides in honey

This paper presented a simple and effective solid-phase extraction method using α-zirconium phosphate intercalated by hexadecyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (α-ZrP–CTMAB) as a novel adsorbent. Surfactant-assisted method was applied to prepare α-ZrP–CTMAB whose sorbent properties and extraction efficiency were investigated. Four sulfonamides (SAs) in honey were selected as analytical models and finally determined by liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry. The recoveries of SAs at three spiked levels (10, 100, 1000 ng g−1) were in the range of 58.7–99.3% and the relative standard deviations ranged from 2.69% to 7.48%. The detection limits obtained were 0.25–0.5 ng g−1. Compared with other methods in the literatures, the proposed method reduced the consumption of organic solvents and simplified the sample preparation procedure for the analysis of SAs in honey. Therefore, modified α-ZrP showed great potential in the analysis of pollutants in complex samples.