Coiled carbon nanotubes combined with ionic liquid: a new soft material for SPE

For the first time a soft material formed from coiled carbon nanotubes and 1-hexyl-3-methylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate has been used as sorbent material. The soft material has high stability as well as a high capacity to adsorb analytes. In this work we propose using a natural cotton fiber impregnated with the soft material to miniaturize the system. The system was tested for the analysis of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in spiked river water samples. The absolute recovery ranged between 97.5 and 105.5 %, demonstrating the usefulness of the soft material. The limit of detection ranged from 2.5 to 6.1 μg/L and the precision expressed as the relative standard deviation for the analysis of five consecutive analyses ranged between 2.5 and 5.8 %.