Ionic liquids based single drop microextraction combined with electrothermal vaporization inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry for determination of Co,Hg and Pb in biological and environmental samples

A new method of ionic liquids based cycle flow single drop microextraction combined with electrothermal vaporization inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ETV-ICP-MS) was proposed for the determination of trace Co, Hg and Pb with 1-(2-pyridylazo)-2-naphthol (PAN) as both extractant and chemical modifier and 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate as the extraction solvent. Several factors that influence the microextraction efficiency, such as sample pH, sample flow rate, microdrop volume and extraction time, were investigated and the optimized microextraction conditions were established. Co, Hg and Pb in the post-extraction ionic liquids phase were directly determined by ETV-ICP-MS with the use of PAN as chemical modifier. The chemical modification of PAN in ETV-ICP-MS was studied and the factors affecting the vaporization behaviors of target analytes were investigated. Under the optimized conditions, the detection limits of the method were 1.5, 9.8 and 6.7 pg/mL for Co, Hg and Pb, with the relative standard deviations for 0.5 ng/mL (n = 7) of Co, Hg and Pb were 7.7%, 5.2% and 12.0%, respectively. After 10 min of extraction, the enrichment factors were 350 (Co), 50 (Hg) and 60 (Pb). The proposed method was successfully applied to the determination of trace Co, Hg and Pb in human serum and environmental water samples. In order to validate the developed method, a certified reference material of human hair (GBW07601) was analyzed and the determined values were in good agreement with the certified values.