Rapid enrichment and sensitive determination of tetrabromobisphenol A in environmental water samples with ionic liquid dispersive liquid-phase microextraction prior to HPLC-ESI-MS-MS

A new microextraction method termed ionic liquid dispersive liquid-phase microextraction has been developed for the rapid enrichment and sensitive determination of tetrabromobisphenol A in environmental water samples prior to high-performance liquid chromatography-electrospray tandem mass spectrometry. Instead of using toxic organic solvents, green solvent ionic liquid was used as extraction solvent. Factors that may influence the enrichment efficiency, such as type and volume of ionic liquid, type and volume of disperser solvent, sample pH, extraction time and NaCl content were investigated and optimized in detail. Under optimum conditions, linearity of the method was observed over the range 1-100 μg L^-1 with correlation coefficient 0.9986. The proposed method has been found to have excellent sensitivity with limit of detection 0.06 μg L^-1 and precision 6.95% (RSD, n = 5). This method has been successfully applied to analyze real environmental water samples and satisfactory results were achieved. All these results indicated that the present method was an environmentally friendly method for the rapid enrichment and sensitive analysis of tetrabromobisphenol A at trace level in environmental water samples.