Comparison of Hollow Fiber and Single-Drop Liquid-Phase Microextraction Techniques for HPLC Determination of Aniline Derivatives in Water

The development of rapid, inexpensive, and environmentally friendly sample-preparation techniques is a serious issue in chemical analysis. This explains the success of two new miniaturized liquid-phase microextraction techniques used as sample-preconcentration techniques for liquid chromatography – hollow fiber and single-drop liquid-phase microextraction. In hollow-fiber-based microextraction (HFME) a hollow fiber is filled with an organic solvent to establish and protect micro volumes of acceptor solution. This attractive, simple, low cost method, which is highly selective and enables substantial enrichment, has been compared with single-drop microextraction (SDME), using four aniline derivatives (3-chloroaniline, 3-bromoaniline, 2-nitroaniline, and 4-nitroaniline) as model compounds. The most important conditions and practical considerations for method optimization are discussed. The results showed that enrichment factors varied from 91.0 to 180.1 for SDME and from 106.43 to 286.33 for HFME. Extraction times were approximately equal. Stirring speeds selected for SDME and HFME were 800 and 900 rev min−1, respectively. Other quantitative data were almost identical.