A dual-functional membrane for bisphenol A enrichment and resonance amplification by surface-enhanced Raman scattering

Bisphenol A (BPA) was one of the environmental hormones that would cause endocrine and metabolic disorders in human or wildlife. This paper proposed a method to detect the trace amounts of BPA in water samples by fully utilizing the enrichment and resonance amplification functions of a new dual-functional membrane. In this work, gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) modified by 3-amino-5-mercapto-1,2,4-triazole (AMT) were embedded in nylon66 membrane to produce a dual-functional membrane which could carry out sample enrichment by capturing BPA molecules from water and achieve resonance amplification by connecting BPA to the surfaces of AuNPs. By designing an automatic sampler for large-volume enrichment, the SERS enhancement factor (EF) of the method was further improved to 1.2 × 10⁵. The present method had been successfully applied to detect BPA in drinking water and environmental water by SERS with the detection limit of 0.012 μg/L. It had the potential for on-site detecting of BPA in various water samples.