| Abstract | Increasing awareness of the presence of nanosized plastic particles (nanoplastics) in the environment has raised interest in their physical and chemical properties and concerns about their environmental effects and potential impact on drinking water and food. Some of the major challenges of environmental nanoplastics research are the difficulty of extracting sufficient amounts of nanoparticles from natural sources for various analytical techniques and the determination of their concentration and size distribution. Overcoming these challenges requires developing robust protocols and methodologies for the extraction and concentration enrichment of nanoparticles. To address this, we explored a tangential flow filtration (TFF) technology to separate and recover 50-nm-in-diameter polystyrene nanoparticles (PS50) from their mixture with larger, 350-nm-in-diameter particles (PS350). We used nanoparticle tracking analysis (NTA) and dynamic light scattering (DLS) to quantify separation and recovery efficiency and assessed the feasibility of using DLS for particle concentration measurement. With sufficient diafiltration volumes, we were able to separate and concentrate PS50 particles with recovery efficiency greater than 95%. Our work shows that TFF is capable of efficiently separating and concentrating nanoplastics from potentially complex environmental matrices, which makes it an essential platform for advancing research in this field. DLS can be used to monitor the nanoparticle separation and concentration efficiency and, when aided by other techniques such as NTA or calibrated using a suitable reference material, reliably estimate the nanoparticle concentration. |
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