Research Info

Owing to high speed in industrial development, cadmium and lead as toxic heavy metals are used in various fields such as battery manufacturing, plastic and synthetic fiber industry and etc. These metals may release into the environment via industrial wastewater and air [1]. Water pollution including cadmium and lead has become serious environmental problems for living organisms and human health [2]. Solid phase extraction as one of the most conventional sample treatment techniques which is widely used and the development forms of SPE are spread out in recent years. Among them, dispersive solid phase extraction is preferred more due to the short extraction time, rapidity, and facile operational process [3]. In this study, onion peel was functionalized with N-acetic acid and used as a novel sorbent for vortexed assisted dispersive solid phase extraction of cadmium and lead from water samples. The pH of the 20 mL solution of analytes was set at 5 and after adding 20 mg sorbent the mixture as vortexed for 3 min and centrifuged subsequently. The upper phase was removed. The sorbent was eluted with nitric acid (0.1 mol L-1) to desorb the analytes and then analysed with microwave plasma-atomic emission spectrometry (MP-AES). The effect of influential parameters including pH, amount of sorbent, extraction time, sample volume and ionic strength were investigated. Under optimum conditions the limits of detection (LODs) (n=10) of 0.58, 0.72, µg L-1, the linear rage of 1-100 µg L-1, 1-250 µg L-1, and enhancement factors of 178.5, 182.4 were acquired for cadmium and lead respectively. The relative standard deviations (RSD % (n=7)) of 2.2 and 2.7 were obtained for cadmium and lead. High potential DSPE-MPAES was successfully applied in food and environmental samples.