Selective extraction of bisphenol A from water by one‐monomer molecularly imprinted magnetic nanoparticles

Abstract One‐monomer molecularly imprinted magnetic nanoparticles were prepared as adsorbents for selective extraction of bisphenol A from water in this study. A single bi‐functional monomer was adopted for preparation of the molecularly imprinted polymer, avoiding the tedious trial‐and‐error optimizations as traditional strategy. Moreover, bisphenol F was used as the dummy template for bisphenol A to avoid the interference from residual template molecules. These nanoparticles showed not only large adsorption capacity and good selectivity to the bisphenol A but also outstanding magnetic response performance. Furthermore, they were successfully used as magnetic solid‐phase extraction adsorbents of bisphenol A from various water samples, including tap water, river water, and seawater. The developed method was found to be much more efficient, convenient, and economical for selective extraction of bisphenol A compared with the traditional solid‐phase extraction. Separation of these nanoparticles can be easily achieved with an external magnetic field, and the optimized adsorption time was only 15 min. The recoveries of bisphenol A in different water samples ranged from 85.38 to 93.75%, with relative standard deviation lower than 7.47%. These results showed that one‐monomer molecularly imprinted magnetic nanoparticles had the potential to be popular adsorbents for selective extraction of pollutants from water.