Determination of triazine herbicides in vegetables by ionic liquid foam floatation solid phase extraction high performance liquid chromatography

• The ILFF–SPE was applied directly to the treatment of solid sample.
• The ILFF–SPE was developed to extract and enrich triazine herbicides in vegetables.
• The extraction and enrichment of target analytes were performed simultaneously.
• The six kinds of triazines in vegetable samples were extracted and determined.

The ionic liquid foam floatation solid phase extraction was established and applied to the extraction of six triazine herbicides, including desmetryn, secbumeton, terbumeton, terbuthylazine, dimethametryn and dipropetryn, in vegetable samples. To obtain the optimized experimental parameters, the effects of pH value of sample solution, the type and concentration of ionic liquid, the flow rate of carrier gas, foam floatation time, the type of solid phase extraction cartridge, the type and volume of elution solvent on the recoveries of the analytes were examined. The high performance liquid chromatography was applied to the determination of the analytes. Under the optimized experimental conditions, the linearities for determining the analytes were satisfactory and the limits of detection for desmetryn, secbumeton, terbumeton, terbuthylazine, dimethametryn and dipropetryn were 2.50, 1.75, 2.76, 1.87, 1.36 and 1.44 μg kg−1, respectively. The recoveries of the analytes ranged from 78.64% to 104.37% and the relative standard deviations ranged from 1.44 to 6.45%. The real samples were analyzed and the results were satisfactory.