Silica Based Mesoporous Materials as Sorbents for Solid-Phase Extraction of Organic Pollutants in Water

Since the first applications of solids with adsorbent properties in water treatment, Solid-Phase Extraction (SPE) has been the most suitable sample preparation technique for the determination of organic pollutants in water. In the last decades, numerous articles have appeared in the literature describing a wide variety of SPE sorbents. Attention in this field has focused on the search for new SPE materials capable of extracting a wide variety of pollutants from water. However, each sorbent has advantages for certain compounds, but not when it is used with others. Thus, conventional sorbents showed poor performance for most high polarity analytes. Recently, mesoporous materials are attracting increasing interest in sample preparation due to their desirable characteristics. They present unique advantages as highly ordered and size-controlled mesoporous structures, high surface areas and large pore volumes, good performance in thermal and chemical stability, compositional controllability and flexibility for functionalization.