Surface Nanodroplet-Based Extraction Combined with Offline Analytic Techniques for Chemical Detection and Quantification

Liquid-liquid extraction based on surface nanodroplets can be a green and sustainable technique to extract and concentrate analytes from a sample flow. However, because of the extremely small volume of each droplet (<10 fL, tens of micrometers in base radius and a few or less than 1 μm in height), only a few in situ analytical techniques, such as surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, were applicable for the online detection and analysis based on nanodroplet extraction. To demonstrate the versatility of surface nanodroplet-based extraction, in this work, the formation of octanol surface nanodroplets and extraction were performed inside a 3 m Teflon capillary tube. After extraction, surface nanodroplets were collected by injecting air into the tube, by which the contact line of surface droplets was collected by the capillary force. As the capillary allows for the formation of ∼10¹²surface nanodroplets on the capillary wall, ≥2 mL of octanol can be collected after extraction. The volume of the collected octanol was enough for the analysis of offline analytical techniques such as UV-vis, GC-MS, and others. Coupled with UV-vis, reliable extraction and detection of two common water pollutants, triclosan and chlorpyrifos, was shown by a linear relationship between the analyte concentration in the sample solution and UV-vis absorbance. Moreover, the limit of detection (LOD) as low as 2 × 10^-9M for triclosan (∼0.58 μg/L) and 3 × 10^-9M for chlorpyrifos (∼1.05 μg/L) could be achieved. The collected surface droplets were also analyzed via gas chromatography (GC) and fluorescence microscopy. Our work shows that surface nanodroplet extraction may potentially streamline the process in sample pretreatment for sensitive chemical detection and quantification by using common analytic tools.