ORIGINAL PAPER Graphene oxide/polydimethylsiloxane-coated stainless steel mesh for use in solid-phase extraction cartridges and extraction of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons Amirhassan Amiri 1 & Mehdi Baghayeri 1 & Fatemeh Karimabadi 1 & Ferial Ghaemi 2 & Behrooz Maleki 1 Received: 29 September 2019 /Accepted: 24 February 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract The stainless steel mesh, in the form of the disk, was coated with graphene oxide and poly(dimethylsiloxane) (GO-PDMS) by sol – gel technique. The coated stainless steel meshes are loaded in the mini-column as solid-phase extraction cartridge for the fast isolation and preconcentration of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from real water samples. The extracted PAHs (naph- thalene, acenaphthene, acenaphthylene, anthracene, benz[a]anthracene, fluorene, and pyrene) were quantified by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. The operation parameters affecting the extraction efficiency including sample volume, de- sorption conditions, and ionic strength were investigated. At optimized conditions, the linearity of this method is obtained from 0.001 to 20 ng mL -1 with 0.2 to 1.0 pg mL -1 limit of detection. For 5 replicates at 3 spiking levels (0.1, 1, and 10 ng mL -1 ), the relative standard deviations between 4.0 and 6.3% were achieved. The absolute extraction recovery varied from 89.1 to 94.7%. The enrichment factors were in the range of 2227–2367. The method has been employed in the determination of PAHs in the real water samples including well water, tap water, river water, and wastewater. Relative recoveries are between 95.2 and 100.9%. Keywords GC-MS . PDMS . Stainless steel mesh . Sol–gel-based coating . SPE . Sample preparation Introduction Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are well-known en- vironmental persistent pollutants with toxic, carcinogenic, and mutagenic properties. Due to their mutagenic and carcinogen- ic characteristics, the World Health Organization (WHO) [1], European Union (EU) [2], and US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have listed PAH as priority pollutants [3]. Due to the trace levels of PAHs in various samples, it is important to develop a sensitive and selective method for extracting compounds from complex matrices [4–8]. Solid-phase extraction (SPE) plays a crucial role in sample pretreatment. The nanomaterials with unique properties have been introduced for their use in the SPE method as sorbent. But, the accumulation of nanomaterials causes the sorption capacity and also prevents effective adsorption and elution of analytes [9, 10]. Therefore, in order to solve these prob- lems, some new sample preparation methods have been de- signed including dispersive micro-solid-phase extraction [11, 12], magnetic solid-phase extraction [13, 14], dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction [15, 16], hollow fiber liquid- phase microextraction [ 17 , 18 ], and solid-phase microextraction [19, 20] that can save time, labor, and solvent consumption. In the sorptive microextraction method [21–23], the stain- less steel mesh coated with graphene oxide is introduced as a novel sorbent that utilizes as the substrate platform for in- crease contact surface area and rapid and fast analyte diffusion [24]. The surface of the stainless steel network incorporates the high loading of sorbent onto the substrate that leads to a phenomenal increase in adsorption capacity and fast extrac- tion equilibrium. The permeability of the substrate creates a Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00604-020-4193-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Amirhassan Amiri Amiri_amirhassan@yahoo.com; Ah.amiri@hsu.ac.ir 1 Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Sciences, Hakim Sabzevari University, Sabzevar 96179-76487, Iran 2 Department of Chemical and Process Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), 43600 Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia Microchimica Acta (2020) 187:213 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00604-020-4193-z