Ionic liquid-based air-assisted liquid-liquid microextraction followed by high performance liquid chromatography for the determination of five fungicides in juice samples.

A novel and simple ionic liquid-based air-assisted liquid-liquid microextraction technique combined with high performance liquid chromatography was developed to analyze five fungicides in juice samples. In this method, ionic liquid was used instead of a volatile organic solvent as the extraction solvent. The emulsion was formed by pulling in and pushing out the mixture of aqueous sample solution and extraction solvent repeatedly using a 10mL glass syringe. No organic dispersive solvent was required. Under the optimized conditions, the limits of detection (LODs) were 0.4-1.8μgL at a signal-to-noise ratio of 3. The limits of quantification (LOQs) set as the lowest spiking levels with acceptable recovery in juices were 10μgL, except for fludioxonil whose LOQ was 20μgL. The proposed method was applied to determine the target fungicides in juice samples, and acceptable recoveries ranging from 74.9% to 115.4% were achieved.