Enrichment of Polychlorinated Biphenyls from Aqueous Solutions Using Fe<sub>3</sub>O<sub>4</sub> Grafted Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes with Poly Dimethyl Diallyl Ammonium Chloride

Abstract

In this paper, Fe₃O₄ nanoparticles (Fe₃O₄ NPs) grafted carboxyl groups of multiwalled carbon nanotubes with cationic polyelectrolyte poly (dimethyldiallylammonium chloride) (PDDA) (MWCNTs-COO⁻/PDDA@Fe₃O₄), are successfully synthesized and used for the extraction of six kinds of major toxic polychorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from a large volume of water solution. The hydrophilicity of the PDDA cage can enhance the dispersibility of sorbents in water samples, and the superparamagnetism of the Fe₃O₄ NPs facilitate magnetic separation which directly led to the simplification of the extraction procedure. With the magnetic solid-phase extraction (MSPE) technique based on the MWCNTs-COO⁻/PDDA@Fe₃O₄ sorbents, it requires only 30 min to extract trace levels of PCBs from 500 mL water samples. When the eluate condensed to 1.0 mL, concentration factors for PCBs became over 500. The spiked recoveries of several real water samples for PCBs were in the range of 73.3–98.9% with relative standard deviations varying from 3.8% to 9.4%, reflecting good accuracy of the method. Therefore, preconcentration of trace level of PCBs by using this MWCNTs-COO⁻/PDDA@Fe₃O₄ sorbent, which are stable for multiple reuses, from water solution can be performed.

Keywords

• Fe<sub>3</sub>O<sub>4</sub> nanoparticles
• MWCNTs
• solid-phase extraction
• polychorinated biphenyls
• trace levels