Evaluation of sisal fiber as biosorbent for online preconcentration and determination of Cu and Mn coupled to MP AES using the analytical greenness metric approach

Abstract

Biorsorbents can be used to pack minicolumns for the preconcentration of trace elements and thus improve the detection limits of some techniques. A biosorbent is efficient when presents binding sites as carbonyls, amines, and carboxylic groups, among others. Thus, natural materials as the sisal fiber (Agave sisalana) may be a good candidate. Sisal fiber demonstrated good performance for Cu preconcentration when it was impregnated with alizarine fluorine blue (AFB). However, very good results were reported for the first time by our group with this column, without the use of additional reagents for both, Mn and Cu determinations in water samples by using microwave plasma atomic emission spectroscopy (MP AES). In this paper a comparison of the sisal fiber preparation with and without impregnation with AFB is presented and discussed in terms of the figures of merit, including precision, trueness, limits of detection and quantification. In addition to that, the number of determinations without the need of replacement of the solid phase was evaluated. Results demonstrated that the impregnation of sisal fiber with AFB does not leads to an improvement in the analytical performance. Analytical Greenness Metric Approach (AGREE) was used to evaluate the greenness of both methods and results obtained were similar. Despite this, the method without impregnation of the fiber has some remarkable advantages, that contributes to Green Analytical Chemistry (GAC), related to the lifetime of the sorbent, not considered in the AGREE tool.