New home-made assembly for hollow-fibre membrane extraction of persistent organic pollutants from real world samples

Nowadays, hollow fibre membrane extraction techniques are widely used but they are usually applied to water or very simple matrices such as water. In this paper, we propose a new assembly that allows the extraction of forty persistent organic pollutants in real world samples, namely orange juice, porcine plasma and tomatoes. The limits of detection obtained are very low even in the analysis of real samples (9–182 ng L−1). The relative standard deviations vary from 1 to 18% and the averaged recoveries in the spike experiments are very high (65–120%) in the different types of samples studied. The new assembly allows a very good precision overcoming in one of the most important shortcomings of membrane extraction techniques. A central composite design has been performed to get optimal extraction conditions for the analytes and also the combined response of all the analytes has been obtained to attain the simultaneous optimum.

► The present paper reports the use of hollow-fibre membrane extraction for the analysis of POPs in complex samples.
► The home-made assembly allows the reliable sample preparation and enhances the reproducibility of the analytical technique.
► A multivariate optimization has also been carried out.
► The procedure has been applied to real world samples with high reliability.