Rapid determination of triclosan in personal care products using new in-tube based ultrasound-assisted salt-induced liquid–liquid microextraction coupled with high performance liquid chromatography-ultraviolet detection

This paper describes the development of a novel, simple and efficient in-tube based ultrasound-assisted salt-induced liquid–liquid microextraction (IT-USA-SI-LLME) technique for the rapid determination of triclosan (TCS) in personal care products by high performance liquid chromatography-ultraviolet (HPLC-UV) detection. IT-USA-SI-LLME method is based on the rapid phase separation of water-miscible organic solvent from the aqueous phase in the presence of high concentration of salt (salting-out phenomena) under ultrasonication. In the present work, an indigenously fabricated home-made glass extraction device (8-mL glass tube inbuilt with a self-scaled capillary tip) was utilized as the phase separation device for USA-SI-LLME. After the extraction, the upper extractant layer was narrowed into the self-scaled capillary tip by pushing the plunger plug; thus, the collection and measurement of the upper organic solvent layer was simple and convenient. The effects of various parameters on the extraction efficiency were thoroughly evaluated and optimized. Under optimal conditions, detection was linear in the concentration range of 0.4–100 ng mL−1 with correlation coefficient of 0.9968. The limit of detection was 0.09 ng mL−1 and the relative standard deviations ranged between 0.8 and 5.3% (n = 5). The applicability of the developed method was demonstrated for the analysis of TCS in different commercial personal care products and the relative recoveries ranged from 90.4 to 98.5%. The present method was proven to be a simple, sensitive, less organic solvent consuming, inexpensive and rapid procedure for analysis of TCS in a variety of commercially available personal care products or cosmetic preparations.

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► In-tube based salt-induced liquid–liquid ultrasonic microextraction was developed.
► This method is applied for trace analysis of triclosan in personal care products.
► This is an efficient, easy, inexpensive and eco-friendly sample preparation method.