ISSN print edition: 0366-6352 ISSN electronic edition: 1336-9075 Registr. No.: MK SR 9/7 Published monthly

Highly efficient extraction of atrazine and propazine from food samples using poly (vinyl alcohol) electrospun nanofibers modified with graphene oxide/cellulose

Benyamin Aliakbari, Shima Amini, Homeira Ebrahimzadeh, and Saeed Hejabri Kandeh

Department of Analytical Chemistry and Pollutants, Faculty of Chemistry and Petroleum Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

E-mail: h-ebrahim@sbu.ac.ir

Received: 9 January 2023  Accepted: 3 May 2023

Abstract:

Herein, a thin film based on poly (vinyl alcohol) (PVA) modified with citric acid (CA)/graphene oxide (GO)/cellulose was electrospun and characterized. The fabricated nanofibers were applied in thin-film micro-extraction (TFME) of two pesticides in food sample (watermelon, milk, honey, melon, tomato) and agricultural water followed by corona discharge ionization ion mobility spectrometry (CD-IMS) analysis. From the evaluation of scanning electron microscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction, the successful fabrication of the composite nanofibers was approved. The introduction of cellulose with a large number of OH-functional groups not only improves the GO properties but also increases the composite extraction efficiency. The efficacy of several key parameters (salt effect, adsorption time, sample pH, eluent sort, agitation speed, time of desorption and size of sorbent) on the analytes extraction efficiency was evaluated. Under the optimized conditions, acceptable linearity was acquired in the range of 3.0–1000.0 ng mL⁻¹ for atrazine (R² = 0.9987) and 5.0–1500.0 ng mL⁻¹ for propazine, (R² = 0.9990). The LOD values (based on signal to noise S/N = 3) ranged from 1.0 to 1.60 ng m L⁻¹. For precision evaluation, relative standard deviations (RSDs) were calculated which were between 4.6–5.5% (between-day, n = 5) and 5.9–7.3% (within-day, n = 3) for three sequential days. This method was investigated using food and water samples, and recoveries (87.1–96.8%) indicate that the PVA/CA/GO/cellulose can be a promising film for the extraction of the desired compounds in complicated samples.

Keywords: Electrospinning; Thin-film micro-extraction; Pesticides; Graphene oxide; Food analysis

Full paper is available at www.springerlink.com.

DOI: 10.1007/s11696-023-02857-6

Chemical Papers 77 (9) 5213–5225 (2023)