Single Drop Microextraction Analytical Technique for Simultaneous Separation and Trace Enrichment of Atrazine and its Major Degradation Products from Environmental Waters Followed by Liquid Chromatographic Determination

In this work, a method of single drop microextraction (SDME) combined with high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with diode array detection (DAD) was studied for trace level enrichment as well as simultaneous determination of atrazine (ATZ) and its major degradation products such as desethylatrazine (DEA) and desisopropylatrazine (DIA) in environmental waters. The main factors influencing the extraction procedure including types and volume of extraction solvent, sample stirring rate, sample solution pH, extraction temperature, extraction time, and salting out effect were optimized. The method detection limits were as low as 0.01 for ATZ and 0.05 for both DIA and DEA, with coefficients of determination better than 0.998 within a linear range of 0.5-150 μg L-1. Under the optimal conditions, the proposed method was applied for the analysis of real water samples and good spiked recoveries in the range of 65.6%-96.3% with relative standard deviation of less than 5% were obtained. The results confirmed that the proposed procedure provides reliable precision, linearity and sensitivity and is very effective for analyzing the target compounds in environmental waters. Therefore, the developed SDME method coupled with HPLC-DAD was found to be simple, inexpensive, and environmentally benign sample pretreatment technique.