Decyl‐perfluorinated magnetic mesoporous microspheres for extraction and analysis perfluorinated compounds in water using ultrahigh‐performance liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry

In this work, the interior‐walls decyl‐perfluorinated functionalized magnetic mesoporous microspheres (F₁₇–Fe₃O₄@mSiO₂) were synthesized for the first time, and applied as adsorbents to extract and concentrate perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) from water samples. The fluorous functionalized interior pore‐walls contributed to the high‐selective preconcentration of PFCs due to fluorous affinity; and abundant silanol groups on the exterior surface of microspheres contributed to the good dispersibility in water sample. Four kinds of PFCs were selected as model analytes, including perfluorooctanoic acid, perfluorononanoic acid, perfluorododecanoic acid, and perfluorooctane sulphonate. In addition, UHPLC‐ESI/MS/MS was introduced to the fast and sensitive detection of the analytes after sample pretreatment. Important parameters of the extraction procedure were optimized, including salinity, eluting solvent, the amount of F₁₇–Fe₃O₄@mSiO₂ microspheres, and extraction time. The optimized procedure took only 10 min to extract analytes with high recoveries and merely 800‐μL acetonitrile to elute analytes from the magnetic adsorbents. Validation experiments showed good linearity (0.994–0.998), precision (2.6–7.6%), high recovery (93.4–105.7%) of the proposed method, and the limits of detection were from 0.008 to 0.125 μg/L. The F₁₇–Fe₃O₄@mSiO₂ magnetic microspheres have the advantages of great dispersibility in aqueous solution, high specificity of extraction, large surface area, and efficient separation ability. The results showed that the proposed method based on F₁₇–Fe₃O₄@mSiO₂ microspheres is a simple, fast, and sensitive tool for the analysis of PFCs in water sample.