Introduction of coiled solid phase microextraction fiber coated by mesoporous silica/cetyltrimethylammonium bromide for ultra-trace environmental analysis

•Coiled SPME (C-SPME) as new type of SPME fiber was developed for the first time.•C-SPME fiber was easily prepared and coated with silica based mesoporous materials.•MCM-41/CTAB as fiber coating showed enhanced extraction performance.•MCM-41/CTAB was synthesized by Electro-Assisted Self Assembly method.•This method was successfully applied for the determination of PAHs in real samples.

In this study, a tiny coiled cupper wire as a novel solid phase microextraction (SPME) fiber was coated with mesoporous silica/cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (MCM-41/CTAB) as an adsorbent by electrochemically assisted self-assembly method and used for the preconcentration of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) as model analytes prior to chromatographic determination. Deposition of MCM-41/CTAB on the coiled SPME (C-SPME) fiber resulted in easily controlled and reproducible SPME coatings. Non-calcined MCM-41/CTAB on C-SPME plays a key role in the adsorption of PAHs. Under the optimized experimental conditions, low detection limits (36-1220 pg L−1), and wide linear dynamic ranges (R2 > 0.98) were achieved in the range of 0.25-25,000, 0.12-15,000, 0.56-32,000, 4.1-100,000 ng L−1 for phenanthrene, anthracene, fluoranthene and pyrene respectively. The reusability of proposed fiber as well as relative standard deviations for repetitive determination of the target analytes was evaluated. The proposed method was successfully applied for determination of PAHs in several real samples.