Use of a novel medium, the ionic liquid 1-butyl-3-trimethylsilylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate, for liquid-liquid extraction of lead in water and its determination by graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometry.

The ionic liquid 1-butyl-3-trimethylsilylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate, abbreviated as [C4tmsim][PF6], was developed as a novel medium for liquid-liquid extraction of lead(II) in water, in which dithizone was used as a metal chelator to form a neutral lead-dithizone complex. Under optimal conditions, the complex was extracted into the [C4tmsim][PF6] phase from aqueous solution and back-extracted with nitric acid solution into the aqueous phase that was used directly for the subsequent determination of Pb. The system using the ionic liquid demonstrated good extraction performance; the extraction and back-extraction efficiencies were 99.8 and 99.7%, respectively, for Pb(II) at 20 microg/L. The above procedure, including the extraction and back-extraction, was used to enrich trace levels of Pb(ll) in a relatively large volume of water samples (1000 mL water), and an enrichment factor of 400 was obtained. The enrichment coupled with graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometry was successfully applied to the determination of Pb in water. The calibration graph was linear at levels near the detection limits up to > or = 100 ng/L Pb(II). The limits of quantitation and detection for lead in real water samples were 2.5 and 1.0 ng/L, respectively. Lead recoveries of 96.2-103.8% from spiked samples demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed method.