Combination of ultrasound-assisted ionic liquid dispersive liquid-phase microextraction and high performance liquid chromatography for the sensitive determination of benzoylureas pesticides in environmental water samples.

This paper describes a new method for rapid and sensitive determination of diflubenzuron, flufenoxuron, triflumuron and chlorfluazuron in water samples by ultrasound-assisted ionic liquid dispersive liquid-phase microextraction in combination with HPLC. Ionic liquid 1-hexyl-3-methylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate ([C(6)MIM][PF(6)]) was used as the extraction solvent for the enrichment of four benzoylurea (BU) pesticides. Factors such as volume of [C(6)MIM][PF(6)], sonication time, sample pH, extraction time, centrifuging time and salting-out effect were systematically investigated. Under the optimum conditions, an excellent linear relationship was achieved in the range of 1.0-100 μg/L. The detection limits varied from 0.21 to 0.45 μg/L and the precision of the method was below 6.9% (RSD, n=6). The proposed method was successfully applied for the determination of these BU pesticides in water samples and excellent spiked recoveries were achieved. All these results demonstrated that this procedure provided a new simple, rapid, easy to operate, efficient and sensitive method for the analysis of BU pesticides in aqueous samples.