Graphene aerogel based monolith for effective solid-phase extraction of trace environmental pollutants from water samples

Abstract

Graphene aerogel (GA), a typical kind of three-dimensional (3D) macroscopic assembly, not only provides inherently excellent properties of graphene sheets (GS), but also exhibits interesting characteristics of the 3D macroporous architecture including large and tunable pore volumes, high specific surface areas and fast mass transport kinetics. Thus, it is rational to expect GA to be an efficient adsorbent for solid-phase extraction (SPE). In this paper, a novel GA monolith based solid-phase extraction method was investigated in the application of environment analysis. The GA monolith based SPE cartridge was fabricated directly in the empty cartridge through template-free "sol-cryo" method. Due to the efficient mass transfer, more adsorption sites as well as effective retention for the analytes, the adsorption property of GA for bisphenol A revealed better performance than that of GS. What's more, GA also outperformed in loading and eluting for target analysis. On the basis of the above advantages, the obtained cartridge was applied for the separation of environmental pollutants from water samples. Taking endocrine disrupting chemicals and polychlorinated biphenyls as the polar and weak polar model analytes, optimizing several parameters influencing the recoveries, limits of detection in the range of 0.01-0.11ngmL(-1) and 0.19-1.53ngL(-1) for the two series of compounds were provided by the established methods. The satisfied sensitivity was accessed and recoveries ranging from 76.3 to 112.5% were obtained for all the analytes when the proposed methods were applied in real water samples analysis. The results revealed the potential of GA as an effective sorbent in sample preparation processes.

Keywords: Endocrine disrupting chemicals; Graphene aerogel based monolith; Polychlorinated biphenyls; Sample preparation; Solid-phase extraction.