Ultrasound-assisted single-drop microextraction for the determination of cadmium in vegetable oils using high-resolution continuum source electrothermal atomic absorption spectrometry

•The determination of cadmium in vegetable oils was developed using UA-SDME.•HR-CS ET-AAS was employed as a detection technique with direct drop sampling.•The procedure allowed for a reduction in the consumption of reagents and samples.

This work presents an ultrasound-assisted single-drop microextraction procedure for the determination of cadmium in vegetable oils using high-resolution continuum source electrothermal atomic absorption spectrometry. Some initial tests showed that the best extraction efficiency was obtained when using ultrasound instead of mechanical agitation, indicating that acoustic cavitation improved the extraction process. Nitric, hydrochloric and acetic acids were evaluated for use in the extraction process, and HNO3 gave the best results. A two-level full-factorial design was applied to investigate the best conditions for the extraction of Cd from the oil samples. The influences of the sonication amplitude, time and temperature of the extraction were evaluated. The results of the design revealed that all of the variables had a significant effect on the experimental results. Afterward, a Box–Behnken design was applied to determine the optimum conditions for the determination of cadmium in vegetable oil samples. According to a multivariate study, the optimum conditions were as follows: sonication amplitude of 60%, extraction time of 15 min, extraction temperature of 46 °C and 0.1 mol L− 1 HNO3 as the extractor solution. Under optimized conditions, the developed method allows for the determination of Cd in oil samples with a limit of quantification of 7.0 ng kg− 1. Addition and recovery experiments were performed in vegetable oil samples to evaluate the accuracy of the method, and the recoveries obtained varied from 90% to 115%. The samples were also analyzed after the acid digestion procedure, and the paired t-test (95% confidence level) did not show significant differences from the proposed method.