Temperature-controlled ionic liquid–liquid-phase microextraction for the pre-concentration of lead from environmental samples prior to flame atomic absorption spectrometry

Hydrophobic ionic liquid could be dispersed into infinite droplets under driving of high temperature, and then they can aggregate as big droplets at low temperature. Based on this phenomenon a new liquid-phase microextraction for the pre-concentration of lead was developed. In this experiment, lead was transferred into its complex using dithizone as chelating agent, and then entered into the infinite ionic liquid drops at high temperature. After cooled with ice-water bath and centrifuged, lead complex was enriched in the ionic liquid droplets. Important parameters affected the extraction efficiency had been investigated including the pH of working solution, amount of chelating agent, volume of ionic liquid, extraction time, centrifugation time, and temperature, etc. The results showed that the usually coexisting ions containing in water samples had no obvious negative effect on the recovery of lead. The experimental results indicated that the proposed method had a good linearity (R = 0.9951) from 10 ng mL−1 to 200 ng mL−1. The precision was 4.4% (RSD, n = 6) and the detection limit was 9.5 ng mL−1. This novel method was validated by determination of lead in four real environmental samples for the applicability and the results showed that the proposed method was excellent for the future use and the recoveries were in the range of 94.8–104.1%.