Application of Fe3O4@MIL-100 (Fe) core-shell magnetic microspheres for evaluating the sorption of organophosphate esters to dissolved organic matter (DOM).

Organophosphate esters (OPEs) are widely used as flame retardants and plasticizers in many products and materials. Because of the potential biologic toxicity on human beings, OPEs are regarded as a class of emerging pollutants. Dissolved organic matters (DOM) have significant effects on the bioavailability and toxicity of the pollutants in the environment. Negligible-depletion solid-phase microextraction (nd-SPME) is an efficient way for measuring the freely dissolved pollutants but suffers from long equilibrium time. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a class of porous crystalline materials with unique properties such as high pore volume, regular porosity, and tunable pore size, being widely used for the extraction of various organic compounds. Here we developed a novel method for quick determination the sorption coefficients of OPEs to DOM in aquatic phase using Fe3O4@MIL-100 (Fe) core-shell magnetic microspheres. The mesoporous structures of the as-synthesized microspheres hindered the extraction of OPEs which associated with humic acid due to the volume exclusion effect. However, the freely dissolved OPEs can access into the mesoporous and then were extracted by MIL-100 (Fe). Due to the small pore size (4.81 nm), large surface area (141 m2 g-1), high pore volume (0.17 g3 g-1), and ultra-thin MOFs layers, Fe3O4@MIL-100 (Fe) core-shell magnetic microspheres have large contact area for the analytes in aqueous phase and therefore the diffusion distance was largely shortened. Besides, the microspheres can be collected conveniently after the extraction process by applying a magnetic field. Compared to the nd-SPME method with 35 h equilibration time (t90%), the proposed method for these studied OPEs only need 24 min to achieve equilibration. The sorption coefficients (logKDOC) of the OPEs to humic acid were ranged from 3.84-5.28, which were highly consistent with the results by using polyacrylate-coated fiber and polydimethylsiloxane-coated fiber with nd-SPME.