A new fabrication strategy of the graphene-coated solid-phase microextraction (SPME) fiber is developed. Graphite oxide was first used as starting coating material that covalently bonded to the fused-silica substrate using 3-aminopropyltriethoxysilane (APTES) as cross-linking agent and subsequently deoxidized by hydrazine to give the graphene coating in situ. The chemical bonding between graphene and the silica fiber improve its chemical stability, and the obtained fiber was stable enough for more than 150 replicate extraction cycles. The graphene coating was wrinkled and folded, like the morphology of the rough tree bark. Its performance is tested by headspace (HS) SPME of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) followed by GC/MS analysis. The results showed that the graphene-coated fiber exhibited higher enrichment factors (EFs) from 2-fold for naphthalene to 17-fold for B(b)FL as compared to the commercial polydimethylsioxane (PDMS) fiber, and the EFs increased with the number of condensed rings of PAHs. The strong adsorption affinity was believed to be mostly due to the dominant role of π-π stacking interaction and hydrophobic effect, according to the results of selectivity study for a variety of organic compounds including PAHs, the aromatic compounds with different substituent groups, and some aliphatic hydrocarbons. For PAHs analysis, the graphene-coated fiber showed good precision (<11%), low detection limits (1.52-2.72 ng/L), and wide linearity (5-500 ng/L) under the optimized conditions. The repeatability of fiber-to-fiber was 4.0-10.8%. The method was applied to simultaneous analysis of eight PAHs with satisfactory recoveries, which were 84-102% for water samples and 72-95% for soil samples, respectively.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.