An on-line push/pull perfusion-based hollow-fiber liquid-phase microextraction system for high-performance liquid chromatographic determination of alkylphenols in water samples

Abstract

In this study, we employed a novel on-line method, push/pull perfusion hollow-fiber liquid-phase microextraction (PPP-HF-LPME), to extract 4-tert-butylphenol, 2,4-di-tert-butylphenol, 4-n-nonylphenol, and 4-n-octylphenol from river and tap water samples; we then separated and quantified the extracted analytes through high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Using this approach, we overcame the problem of fluid loss across the porous HF membrane to the donor phase, permitting on-line coupling of HF-LPME to HPLC. In our PPP-HF-LPME system, we used a push/pull syringe pump as the driving source to perfuse the acceptor phase, while employing a heating mantle and an ultrasonic probe to accelerate mass transfer. We optimized the experimental conditions such as the nature of the HF supported intermediary phase and the acceptor phase, the composition of the donor and acceptor phases, the sample temperature, and the sonication conditions. Our proposed method provided relative standard deviations of 3.1–6.2%, coefficients of determination (r²) of 0.9989–0.9998, and limits of detection of 0.03–0.2 ng mL⁻¹ for the analytes under the optimized conditions. When we applied this method to analyses of river and tap water samples, our results confirmed that this microextraction technique allows reliable monitoring of alkylphenols in water samples.