Polybutylene terephthalate-nickel oxide nanocomposite as a fiber coating

A highly efficient polybutylene terephthalate (PBT)-based nanocomposite containing nickel oxide nanoparticles was synthesized by electrospinning technique and used as a fiber coating for solid phase microextraction. The influential morphological parameters and capability of the prepared nanocomposite including the NiO content, the coating time, the PBT concentration and applied voltage were considered for optimization. The applicability of the synthesized fiber coating was examined by headspace solid phase micro extraction and gas chromatography mass spectrometry detection of some volatile organic compounds in aqueous samples. Among the synthesized nanocomposites and pristine PBT nanofibers, the fiber coating with 14% of NiO nanoparticles doping level exhibited the highest extraction efficiency. In addition, important parameters influencing the extraction/desorption process were investigated and optimized. The detection limits were less than 5 ng L⁻¹ using the selected ion monitoring mode. The inter-day and intra-day precisions of the developed method under optimized conditions were below 11%. The method showed a linearity in the range of 10–1000 ng L⁻¹ with the correlation coefficient greater than 0.9987. The optimized method was applied to the sampling of some volatile organic compounds from real water samples. The developed method is convenient, rapid, simple, easy and inexpensive and offers high sensitivity and sufficient reproducibility.