Graphene oxide based sol-gel stainless steel fiber for the headspace solid-phase microextraction of organophosphate ester flame retardants in water samples

• GO coating bonded onto a stainless steel was fabricated by sol-gel technique.
• The GO based sol-gel fiber was used as HS-SPME sorbent to extract OPFRs from environmental water samples.
• The GO based sol-gel fiber exhibited good extraction performance.

In this paper, graphene oxide was coated onto a stainless steel wire through sol-gel technique and it was used as a solid phase microextraction (SPME) fiber. The prepared fiber was characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), which displayed that the fiber had crinkled surface and porous structure The application of the fiber was evaluated through the headspace SPME of nine organophosphate ester flame retardants (OPFRs) with different characteristics in water samples followed by gas chromatography and nitrogen-phosphorous detector (GC/NPD). The major factors influencing the extraction efficiency, including the extraction and desorption conditions, were studied and optimized. Under the optimum conditions, the proposed method was evaluated, and applied to the analysis of organophosphate ester flame retardants in real environmental water samples. The results demonstrated the HS-SPME method based on GO sol-gel fiber had good linearity (R > 0.9928), and limits of detection (1.4–135.6 ng L−1), high repeatability (RSD < 9.8%) and good recovery (76.4–112.4%). The GO based sol-gel fiber displayed bigger extraction capability than the commercial PDMS fiber and the pure sol-gel fiber for both polar and apolar organophosphate esters, especially for the OPFRs containing benzene rings.