Application of activated carbon-decorated polyacrylonitrile nanofibers as an adsorbent in dispersive solid-phase extraction of fluoroquinolones from wastewater

Abstract

A cheap and simple sample preparation method, consisting of a dispersive solid-phase method and an adsorbent, activated carbon decorated PAN nanofibers, was employed and used for the extraction of antibiotics (ciprofloxacin, danofloxacin, and enrofloxacin) in wastewater. Electrospun PAN nanofibers that were decorated with activated carbon produced from waste tires were used as the solid phase and the antibiotics analyzed by using high-performance liquid chromatography. Parameters such as pH, mass of adsorbent (MA), extraction volume (EV), and extraction time (ET) were optimized owing to their potential effect on the extraction of antibiotics from water. The recovery of all antibiotics was satisfactory, in the range of 90%–99%. The limits of detection and quantification were 0.05, 0.11, 0.20, and 0.53, 1.21, 2.17 µg/L, respectively. The precision was determined from the repeatability and reproducibility and expressed as the intra-day ( n = 20) and inter-day ( n = 5) precision. The intra-day and inter-day precision was reported in terms of the percentage relative standard deviation, which was 3% and 4%, respectively. The adsorption capacity of the activated carbon-decorated PAN nanofibers was satisfactory, and the reusability of the adsorbent was impressive when reused ten times. The accuracy of the dispersive solid phase extraction (DSPE) was validated by spike recovery tests; the results proved the reliability and efficiency of adsorbing antibiotics from wastewater. Finally, the proposed method was applied to wastewater samples collected from a wastewater treatment plant, which included influent, secondary, and effluent wastewater.

Overview of Sample Preparation and Chromatographic Methods to Analysis Pharmaceutical Active Compounds in Waters Matrices

“…Dispersive SPE (DSPE) is based on the SPE methodology, but the sorbent is directly added to the sample without conditioning the clean-up, being easily carried out by shaking and centrifugation. After that, the sorbent with the analytes is washed with an appropriate solvent to recover analytes [111]. Because the contact surface between the sorbent and sample is higher, the extraction equilibrium is more quickly achieved, reducing the extraction time.…”

“…The DSPE was applied to the analysis of antibiotics in mineral waters [113] and wastewaters [111], and natural hormones in river waters [111]. In the last study, a new organic adsorbent was prepared by the electrospinning method with polyacrylonitrile (PAN) and activated carbon.…”

“…The HPLC/UPLC with UV [123,125,127,176,177], DAD [111,114,134,150,161,162] and FLD [124] detection was used in the analysis of PhACs, but, in most applications, it is coupled with tandem mass spectrometry [37,45,98,101,178,179].…”

Magnetic Mesoporous Carbon/β-Cyclodextrin–Chitosan Nanocomposite for Extraction and Preconcentration of Multi-Class Emerging Contaminant Residues in Environmental Samples

“…Owing to matrix effects of complex environmental samples and trace levels of PPCPs, sample cleanup prior to analytical detection and quantification is required. For this reason, different preconcentration and extraction procedures such as liquid-phase microextraction techniques (LPME) [ 26 ], traditional solid-phase extraction (SPE) [ 2 , 16 ], dispersive solid-phase extraction (DSPE) [ 19 , 27 , 28 ], solid-phase microextraction (SPME) [ 29 ], stir bar sorptive extraction (SBSE) [ 21 , 30 ] and supramolecular solvent-based LPME [ 20 , 21 , 30 , 31 , 32 ], among others, have been developed for PPCPs analysis.…”

Disposable Pencil Graphite Electrode for Ciprofloxacin Determination in Pharmaceutical Formulations by Square Wave Voltammetry

“…In this sense, the development of analytical methods with high sensitivity, selectivity for CIP determination, have been widely reported [3]. For this aim chromatographic methods are the most used such as high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and liquid chromatography‐mass spectrometry (LC‐MS) [3d, f, 4], capillary electrophoresis (CE) [3b, c, 5], and spectrophotometry [6]. Even though, these methods are robust and selective, they have disadvantages such as time‐consuming, high instrumentation cost and laborious operation, such as sample treatment.…”