A novel microextraction method termed ionic liquid-based submerged single drop microextraction combining liquid chromatography (LC) was developed for the determination of aromatic amines in environmental water samples. This method is simple and rapid for the determination of three aromatic amines (2-nitroaniline, 3-chloroaniline and 4-bromoaniline) which were selected as model compounds for validation of this new mode of microextraction. This technique combines extraction and preconcentration of the analytes in one step before determination by LC-UV, and the ionic liquid was used instead of the organic solvent as extractant. Several important parameters influencing the extraction efficiency such as the volume of the aqueous sample solution (donor phase), extraction time, pH of the donor phase and salt effect were investigated. Under the optimized conditions, acceptable enrichment factors (132–186) and relative recoveries (82–98%) were obtained for the extraction of the target analytes in real water samples. The calibration curves were linear with correlation coefficients ranging from 0.9983 to 0.9989 and RSDs (n = 5) of 4.9–6.8%. The LODs for the three aromatic amines were 1–2.5 lg L-1 at a signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) of 3.

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