In situ growth and phenyl functionalization of titania nanoparticles coating for solid-phase microextraction of ultraviolet filters in environmental water samples followed by high performance liquid chromatography–UV detection

[Display omitted] •In this work, we present a novel fiber surface self-assembly technology with advantages of simple, quick and high repeatability.•The as-fabricated fiber exhibited significant extraction capability and good selectivity for some UV filters and was employed to sensitive determination of four kinds of ultraviolet (UV) filters in complex actual water samples and the result is satisfactory.•Furthermore, the in situ assembling phenyl on the surface of the TiO2-nanoparticals coating fiber performed well reproducible manner and high mechanical strength, good stability, long service life and low cost, which was superior to commercial solid phase microextraction fiber of PDMS coating. Based on TiO2-nanoparticles coating fabricated by a one-step anodization method on titanium wire substrate, a novel phenyl functionalized solid-phase microextraction (SPME) fiber coating was prepared by simple and rapid in situ chemical assembling technique between the fiber surface titanol groups and trichlorophenylsilane reaction. The as-fabricated fiber exhibited good extraction capability for some UV filters and was employed to determine the ultraviolet (UV) filters in combination with high performance liquid chromatography–UV detection (HPLC–UV). The main parameters affecting extraction performance were investigated and optimized. Under the optimized conditions, the developed method was applied to detect several UV filters at trace concentration levels with only 8mL of sample volume. They were determined in the range from 0.005 to 25μgL−1 with detection limits (S/N=3) from 0.1 to 50ngL−1. The relative standard deviations (RSDs) for single fiber repeatability varied from 4.6 to 6.5% (n=5) and fiber-to-fiber reproducibility (n=5) ranged from 5.5 to 9.1%. The linear ranges spanned two-four magnitudes with correlation coefficients above 0.9990. Five real water samples including four Yellow River water samples and one rain water sample were determined sensitively with good recoveries ranging from 86.2 to 105.5%. The functionalized fiber coating performed good reproducible manner, high mechanical strength, good stability and long service life. Moreover, this study proposed an efficient sample pretreatment method for the determination of UV filters from environmental water samples.