This paper described a simple and novel analytical technique for the determination of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in environmental water samples. A micro-solid phase extraction (mu-SPE) was developed utilizing cetyltrimethylammonium bromide modified ordered TiO(2) nanotube array. The experimental results indicated that modified TiO(2) nanotube arrays demonstrated an excellent merit on the preconcentration of PAHs, and there were excellent linear relationships between peak area and the concentration of PAHs in the range of 0.2-100 mu g L(-1) and 1.0-100 mu g L(-1), respectively. The detection limits of proposed method for the targeted PAHs were in the range of 0.026-0.82 mu g L(-1) (S/N = 3). The real-world environmental water samples were used to validate the applicability of the proposed method and good spiked recoveries were in the range of 75.0-114%. All these results demonstrated that this new mu-SPE technique was a viable alternative to conventional enrichment techniques for the extraction and analysis of PAHs in complex samples. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.