Extraction and separation of triazine herbicides in soybean by ionic liquid foam-based solvent flotation and high performance liquid chromatography determination

Ionic liquid foam-based solvent flotation coupled with high performance liquid chromatography was developed for the extraction, separation and determination of four triazine herbicides, including terbumeton, terbuthylazine, dimethametryn and dipropetryn, from soybean samples. The flotation and concentration of target analytes were performed simultaneously. The effect of the experimental parameters of flotation and extraction, including the pH value of the flotation solution, type of flotation solvent, kind of ionic liquid and flotation time, was investigated and optimized. Under the optimized experimental conditions, the linearity was in the range of 1.5-300.0 mu g kg(-1). The detection limits for terbumeton, terbuthylazine, dimethametryn and dipropetryn were 1.1, 1.8, 0.6, and 0.5 mu g kg(-1), respectively. The present method was successfully applied to the analysis of soybean samples. The recoveries ranged from 84.5% to 106.8% and the precision was lower than 5.1%.