Carbon nanofibers extracted from soot as a sorbent for the determination of aromatic amines from wastewater effluent samples

The isolation and characterization of carbon nanofibers from soot obtained by burning natural oil is reported. The fibers were extracted from the soot with tetrahydrofuran followed by sonication. The carbon nanofibers were mixed with poly(vinyl alcohol) and electrospun to get the nanofiber mat. The extraction ability of electrospun nanofibers for the separation and preconcentration of aromatic compounds such as 3-nitroaniline, 4-chloroaniline, 4-bromoaniline and 3,4-dichloroaniline were tested and efficiently evaluated using high performance liquid chromatography. Under optimized conditions, the method showed good linearity in a range of 0.5–50 μg L−1 with correlation coefficient ranging from 0.989 to 0.998. High precision of the extraction with RSD values of 4.5–5.8% and low LOD value in a range of 0.009–0.081 μg L−1 for all aniline compounds were achieved. The proposed microextraction method offers advantages such as easy operation, high recovery, fast extraction, minimal use of organic solvent and elimination of tedious solvent evaporation and reconstitution steps.