Application of liquid–liquid–liquid microextraction and high-performance liquid-chromatography for the determination of sulfonamides in water

This work presents a novel liquid–liquid–liquid microextraction (LLLME) technique for the extraction of sulfonamides from aqueous systems; it combines with high-performance liquid-chromatography-ultraviolet absorbance detection (HPLC/UV). In this experiment the sulfonamides were successively extracted from a donor phase (i.e., a water sample) into several microliters of an organic phase and then from the organic phase into an acceptor phase (i.e., an aqueous extract) by LLLME. The following separation and quantitative analyses were performed using HPLC/UV with 265 nm detection. Extraction condition such as solvent identity, agitation, extraction time, acceptor phase NaOH concentration, donor phase pH, and salt addition were optimized. Relative standard deviation (RSD, 2.6–5.3%), coefficient of estimation (R2, 0.9972–0.9999), and method detection limit (MDL, 0.11–0.77 ng mL−1) were achieved under the selected conditions. The proposed method was successfully applied to the analyses of three practical water samples and the relative recoveries of sulfonamides from the spiked water samples were in the range of 86.2–108.7%. The proposed method also confirms microextraction to be robust to monitoring trace levels of sulfacetamide, sulfadiazine, sulfathiazole, sulfamerazine, sulfadimidine, sulfamonomethoxine, sulfamethoxazole, and sulfaquinoxaline in aqueous samples.