Measuring current-use pesticides in air: A comparison of silicon carbide foam to XAD as passive air samplers

Abstract Silicon carbide foams have recently proved its efficiency as newly introduced passive sampler for air monitoring. The aim of this work is to assess the field potential of the SiC foams in comparison to the well- known XAD®-2 resins and to improve its performance by grafting Nitrogen-doped carbon (N-C) and Nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes (N-CNT) at several temperatures. The results generated by this work showed that grafted SiC foams are prone to be highly competitive with commonly used XAD®-2 resins and gave better results than the regular SiC foams. Moreover, the obtained results showed that among others both 450 °C N-C SiC and 900 °C N-CNT SiC allowed detection of the highest amount of pesticides and could be considered as new potential adsorbent for pesticides in air.