Hollow-fiber liquid-phase microextraction combined with capillary HPLC for the selective determination of six sulfonylurea herbicides in environmental waters.

A three-phase hollow-fiber liquid-phase microextraction combined with a capillary LC method using diode array detection was proposed for the determination of six sulfonylurea herbicides, triasulfuron, metsulfuron-methyl, chlorsulfuron, flazasulfuron, chlorimuron-ethyl, and primisulfuron-methyl, in environmental water samples. Different factors that can affect the extraction process such as extraction solvent, acidity of the donor phase, composition and pH of the acceptor phase, salt addition, stirring speed, and extraction time were optimized. Under the optimum conditions, detection and quantitation limits between 0.1-1.7 and 0.3-5.7 μg/L, respectively, and enrichment factors ranging from 71 to 548 were obtained. The calibration curves were linear within the range of 0.3-40 μg/L. Intra- and interday RSDs were <6.3 and 8.4%, respectively. The relative recoveries of the spiked ground and river water samples were in the range of 69.4-119.2 and 77.4-111.7%, respectively. The results of the study revealed that the developed methodology involves an efficient sample pretreatment allowing the preconcentration of analytes, combined with the use of a miniaturized separation technique, suitable for the accurate determination of sulfonylurea herbicides in water.