Moisture stable Ni-Zn MOF/g-C 3 N 4 nanoflowers: a highly efficient adsorbent for solid-phase microextraction of PAHs

Abstract Volatile polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in water and soil are associated with status in the human body. Development of simple, efficient detection method is challenging due to the coating could be attacked by the abundance of water in the direct-immersion solid-phase microextraction. The stability of coating is essential to the analysis results. In this paper, a stable Ni-Zn MOF/g-C 3 N 4 (MG NFs) nanoflowers with cavity traps structure was firstly reported and acted as solid-phase microextraction (SPME) adsorbent for PAHs. Markedly enhanced moisture and acid stability of the MG NFs was obtained through the doping the hydrophobic graphitic carbon nitride (g-C 3 N 4 ) and metal ions into metal organic frameworks (MOFs). The aperture environment and ambient environment of MG NFs were changed by the doping of the Ni and the g-C 3 N 4, respectively. The moisture and acid stability of MG NFs were prominently increased under the dual protection. Compared to commonly used commercial coatings, the MG NFs own large surface area, unique nanoflowers structure and numerous open metal sites on the nanosheets, which demonstrated significant extraction superiority for PAHs. The MG NFs coated fiber was used for the SPME preconcentration of PAHs and couped with GC–MS for detecting PAHs. It presented low detection limits (0.1–3.0 ng L −1 ), wide linearity (0.3–5000.0 ng L −1 ) and good linearity (the correlation coefficient >0.9951). The inter-day and intra-day relative standard deviation (RSD) (n = 3) for three replicate extractions using one fiber was 3.8%–9.1%, and 3.5%–9.2%, respectively. The fiber-to-fiber reproducibility (n = 3) was 4.2–11.8%. The coupling method was successfully applied in the analysis of real water and soil samples with satisfactory recoveries of 82.9–109.2%, 84.2–106.4%, and the corresponding RSDs were 2.4–11.3%, 3.6–10.8%, respectively. The results indicated the effectiveness of NG NFs coated fiber in further practical application.