Carbon Dot-Decorated Graphite Carbon Nitride Composites for Enhanced Solid-Phase Microextraction of Chlorobenzenes from Water

Abstract

In this work, carbon dot-decorated graphite carbon nitride composites (CDs/g-C3N4) were synthesized and innovatively used as a SPME coating for the sensitive determination of chlorobenzenes (CBs) from water samples, coupled with gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. The CDs/g-C3N4 coating presented superior extraction performance in comparison to pristine g-C3N4, owing to the enhancement of active groups by CDs. The extraction capacities of as-prepared SPME coatings are higher than those of commercial coatings due to the functions of nitrogen-containing and oxygen-containing group binding, π–π stacking, and hydrophobic interactions. Under optimized conditions, the proposed method exhibits a wide linearity range (0.25–2500 ng L−1), extremely low detection of limits (0.002–0.086 ng L−1), and excellent precision, with relative standard deviations of 5.3–9.7% for a single fiber and 7.5–12.6% for five fibers. Finally, the proposed method was successfully applied for the analysis of CBs from real river water samples, with spiked recoveries ranging from 73.4 to 109.1%. This study developed a novel and efficient SPME coating material for extracting organic pollutants from environmental samples.

Keywords

• carbon dots
• graphite carbon nitride
• sorbent
• solid-phase microextraction
• chlorobenzenes