A novel extraction method named hydrogen fluoride assisted-glass surface etching based liquid phase microextraction (HF-GSE-LPME) was proposed to determine 4-n-nonylphenol at trace levels by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). After the evaluation of system analytical performance for the HF-GSE-LPME-GC-MS system, limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ) values were calculated as 7.1 and 23.8 ng/g, respectively. Enhancement in detection power of the method was determined to be 22 fold when LOD values of the GC-MS and HF-GSE-LPME-GC-MS systems were compared with each other. Applicability and accuracy of the established method were checked by performing spiking experiments. A matrix matching calibration strategy was applied to boost the accuracy of quantification in both matrices, and the percent recovery results obtained for bottled drinking water and dam lake water samples were in the range of 98 - 107 and 90 - 117%, respectively.
Keywords: 4-n-nonylphenol; Hydrogen fluoride; gas chromatography–mass spectrometry; glass etching; water samples.