Utilization of montmorillonite nanocomposite incorporated with natural biopolymers and benzyl functionalized dicationic imidazolium based ionic liquid coated fiber for solid-phase microextraction of organochlorine pesticides prior to GC/MS and GC/ECD

Abstract

A novel montmorillonite clay (MMT) bionanocomposite modified with chitosan (CH), carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC), and benzylimidazolium based dicationic ionic liquid with tetraethylene glycol linker (DIL) was fabricated on stainless steel wire by in situ process. The MMT-CH-CMC-DIL coated solid-phase microextraction (SPME) fiber was examined for the determination of organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) in real samples by HS-SPME-GC method using mass spectrometry (MS) and electron capture detector (ECD). Under optimized conditions, the proposed method exhibited low limits of detection (0.5 ng L^-1 with MS and 0.1 ng L^-1 with ECD detection), good linearities (R² = 0.9972-0.9993 with MS and 0.9987-0.9998 with ECD detection), favorable single-fiber repeatability, and fiber-to-fiber reproducibility (less than 8.2% and 9.9% for both types of detection) and high reusability around 125 cycles. Recovery studies were carried out for OCPs in tap water, green tea, and milk samples to verify the applicability of the developed SPME-GC method.

Keywords: Biopolymers; Clay; Dicationic ionic liquid; GC/MS and GC/ECD; Organochlorine pesticides; Solid phase microextraction.