Electrochemical fabrication of a novel polycarbazole coating for the headspace solid-phase microextraction and GC determination of some chlorobenzenes

A novel polycarbazole coating was prepared by cyclic voltammetry on a platinum wire. The solution for electropolymerization contained N , N -dimethylformamide, propylene carbonate (v/v = 1:9), 0.10 M carbazole and 0.10 M tetrabutylammonium perchlorate; the cyclic scan potential range was 0.8–2.0 V (versus Ag/AgCl). The resulting polycarbazole coating showed a porous structure and had a large specific surface area. When it was used for the headspace solid-phase microextraction of chlorobenzenes (i.e. chlorobenzene, 2-chlorotoluene, 1,2-dichlorobenzene, 1,3-dichlorobenzene, 1,2,4-trichlorobenzene) followed by GC analysis, it presented excellent analytical performance. Under the optimized conditions the linear ranges were 0.25–250 μg/L with correlation coefficients >0.985, and the low detection limits were 15–61 ng/L (S/N = 3) for different chlorobenzenes. The RSDs were 2.4–4.9% for five successive measurements with a single fiber, and for fiber-to-fiber they were 6.3–13.1% ( n = 5). Furthermore, the polycarbazole coating displayed good thermal stability (>350°C) and durability (more than 250 times). The proposed method was successfully applied to the extraction and determination of chlorobenzenes in waste water and lake water, and the recoveries for standards added were 86–114% for different analytes.