Single-walled carbon nanotubes coated fibers for solid-phase microextraction and gas chromatography-mass spectrometric determination of pesticides in Tea samples

Using a single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) as stationary phase of solid-phase microextraction (SPME) fibers, a simple, low cost and environmentally friendly method for extraction of 13 pesticides in Tea samples has been developed following gas chromatography-mass spectrometric determination. Potential factors affecting the extraction efficiency were investigated and optimized, including extraction and desorption time, extraction temperature, stirring rate, solution pH and ionic strength. Under optimized conditions, the linearity of the developed method was in the range of 0.125-25 ng/mL with correlation coefficients greater than 0.9928 and the limits of detections (LODs) were 0.027-0.23 ng/mL (S/N = 3). Meanwhile, the relative standard deviations (RSDs) for five successive measurements with single fiber, fiber-to-fiber, day-to-day were 2.3-13.0, 8.2-14.6 and 4.1-12.5%, respectively, indicating good reproducibility of the proposed method. The fiber had high extraction efficiency for studied pesticides in comparison with commercial poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) and polyacrylate (PA) fibers and could be used for more than 70 times without decrease of efficiency. The developed method was successfully applied for the analysis of real samples including green Tea, oolong Tea, white Tea, and flower Tea, and the recoveries of the pesticides spiked in these samples ranged from 75.1 to 118.4%. Chlorfenapyr and λ-cyhalothrin were found in the Tea samples bought randomly from local market. The results demonstrated that the developed SWCNTs-SPME method was a simple, efficient pretreatment and enrichment procedure for pesticides in complex matrices.