Highly selective adsorption of cadmium ions by water‐dispersible magnetic thioglycolic acid/graphene oxide composites

A new selective and fast procedure based on magnetic dispersive solid‐phase extraction and zeta potential analysis is proposed for the determination of Cd (II) in some food samples. In the developed method, novel magnetic nanoparticles modified with thioglycolic acid were synthesized/characterized and also applied for quantitative determination of trace amounts of Cd (II) in food samples. The prepared nanoparticles were characterized via infrared spectroscopy, electron microscopy and adsorption–desorption experiments. These magnetic nanocomposites carrying Cd (II) could be easily separated from real samples simply by applying an external magnetic field; no filtration or centrifugation was necessary. Several parameters affecting the analytical performance, such as sample pH, amounts of nanocomposite sample, desorption solution volumes and coexisting ions, were investigated in detail. The detection limit of the method was 0.1 μg l^?1 while the relative standard deviation was 1.2% for a Cd (II) concentration of 0.5 mg l^?1. The proposed method was successfully applied to food sample analysis and standard reference material samples with satisfactory results, and excellent recoveries were obtained in the range 95–99% even when the matrix, such as sea water, was complex.