Dispersive liquid–liquid microextraction based on the solidification of floating organic drop followed by ICP-MS for the simultaneous determination of heavy metals in wastewaters

•ICP-MS has some advantages such as accuracy, speed, multi-elemental determination.•DLLME-SFO combined with the ICP-MS for the extraction and determination of heavy metals has several advantages such as rapidity, simplicity of operation, low cost and high enrichment factor.•Few paper have been reported about DLLME-SFO technique combined with the ICP-MS for the extraction and determination of Cu, Ni, Co, Pb and Zn in WWTP.

In the present work, a dispersive liquid–liquid microextraction based on the solidification of floating organic drop (DLLME-SFO) combined with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) was developed for the determination of Pb, Co, Cu, Ni, Zn. The influences of analytical parameters, including pH, extraction solvent volume, disperser solvent volume, concentration of chelating agent on the quantitative recoveries of Pb, Co, Cu, Ni, Zn were investigated. The effect of the interfering ions on the analytes recovery was also investigated. Under the optimized conditions, the limits of detection were 0.97–2.18 ng L−1. The relative standard deviations (RSDs) were 2.62–4.51% (n = 7, C = 20 ng L−1). The proposed method was successfully applied for the analysis of ultra trace metals in wastewater samples.

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