Preparation of an adsorbent based on polymeric ionic liquid for the simultaneous extraction of acidic, basic and neutral pollutants

- A new polymeric ionic liquid-based adsorbent was prepared.
- The adsorbent was used as extractive medium of stir cake sorptive extraction.
- The adsorbent could extract acidic, basic and neutral pollutants simultaneously.
- A method based on the combination of SCSE/PIL-LD-HPLC/DAD was developed.

In this study, coextraction of acidic, basic and neutral pollutants was realized with a new adsorbent based on polymeric ionic liquid (PIL). In the presence of a porogen solvent containing 1-propanol and 1,4-butanediol, an ionic liquid, 1-vinyl-3-octylimidazolium tetrafluoraborate was used as monomer to copolymerize with dual cross-linkers (divinylbenzene and N,N-methylene-bisacrylamide) to form the adsorbent for stir cake sorptive extraction (SCSE). Phenols, aromatic amines and parabens were selected as acidic, basic and neutral model analytes, respectively. The effects of preparation conditions and extraction parameters on the extraction performance of SCSE/PIL were investigated thoroughly. Under the optimized conditions, the prepared adsorbent showed satisfactory coextraction performance to the selected analytes with multiply interactions. At the same time, simple and sensitive analytical method for simultaneous determination of phenols, aromatic amines and parabens in environmental water samples was developed by the combination of SCSE/PIL with high-performance liquid chromatography with diode array detection. Low limits of detection (S/N = 3) and quantification limits (S/N = 10) of the proposed method for the targeted analytes were achieved within the range of 0.064-0.30 μg/L and 0.21-0.99 μg/L, respectively. The precision of the proposed method was evaluated in terms of intra- and inter-assay variability calculated as relative standard deviation (RSD), and it was found that the RSD values were all below 10%. Ultimately, the applicability of developed method was successfully confirmed by analyzing lake, reservoir and river water samples. Recoveries obtained for the determination of targeted analytes in spiking samples ranged from 70.0% to 112%, with RSDs within the range of 1.6-9.8%.