Normal-phase liquid chromatography silica column

One column can be used for different types of liquid chromatography by changing the eluent components. As an example, a column packed with octadecyl-bonded silica gel has been used for size-exclusion liquid chromatography with tetrahydrofuran (THF), normal-phase liquid chromatography with n-hexane, and reversed-phase liquid chromatography with aqueous acetonitrile. Examples of the chromatograms are shown in Figure 1.4. 

Normal-phase liquid chromatography is thus a steric-selective separation method. The molecular properties of steric isomers are not easily obtained and the molecular properties of optical isomers estimated by computational chemical calculation are the same. Therefore, the development of prediction methods for retention times in normal-phase liquid chromatography is difficult compared with reversed-phase liquid chromatography, where the hydrophobicity of the molecule is the predominant determinant of retention differences. When the molecular structure is known, the separation conditions in normal-phase LC can be estimated from Table 1.1, and from the solvent selectivity. A small-scale thin-layer liquid chromatographic separation is often a good tool to find a suitable eluent. When a silica gel column is used, the formation of a monolayer of water on the surface of the silica gel is an important technique. A water-saturated very non-polar solvent should be used as the base solvent, such as water-saturated w-hexane or isooctane. 

In normal-phase liquid chromatography on silica and alumina the hydrogen bonding of fullerenes with surface hydroxyl groups of adsorbent is the most important. On separation of Ceo and C70 on a column packed by alumina Alusorb N 200 from n hexane the selectivity is 1.80 (Fig. 2 a.). The reversed-phase adsorbents such as silica with bonded diphenylsilyl... 

Due to the absence of hydrogen donor capabilities [31], cyanopropyl silica phases are less retentive in normal-phase liquid chromatography than under-ivatized silica or other NP packing materials. Therefore, very few applications have been reported that utilize cyanopropyl-bonded silica in the HILIC mode [32,33]. The limited number of applications may also be attributed to the mechanical instabiUty of cyanopropyl-bonded silica when operated with solvents of intermediate polarity. This instabihty is caused by a decrease in the adhesion of particles to each other that maintain the integrity of the column bed in either nonpolar or highly polar solvents [25]. Dinh et al. [34] performed a multivariate modeling of column selectivity by principal component analysis of chromatographic data from polar compounds of various structures on 20 commercially available HILIC columns and verified the low potential of cyanopropyl-bonded silica columns due to insufficient hydrophilicity. 

Most HPLC is based on the use of so-called normal-phase columns (useful for class separations), reverse-phase columns (useful for homolog separations), and polar columns (used in either the normal- or reverse-phase mode). Since reverse-phase HPLC columns are generally easier to work with, almost all authors use high-performance reverse-phase liquid chromatography with octade-cyl chemically bonded silica as the stationary phase and nonaqueous solvents as mobile phases (so-called NARP, or nonaqueous reverse-phase chromatography). 

Brinkman et al. [35,36] used a silica gel column which elutes the higher chlorinated PCBs in the normal phase. This system produced a reasonable separation of the lower chlorinated PCBs present predominantly in the commercial mixture Arochlor 1221 but was less efficient in separating the more highly-chlorinated PCBs present in Arochlors 1254 and 2160). Kaminsky and Fasco [37] investigated the potential reversed phase liquid chromatography to the analysis of PCB mixture in environmental samples. They used mixtures of water and acetonitrile as the mobile phase to achieve analysis of 49 different PCBs and of samples of Arochlor 1221, 1016, 1254 and 1260. 

Separation of phenols with LC is normally performed with reversed-phase liquid chromatography (RPLC). The mobile phase consists of a mixture of a polar organic solvent (methanol or acetonitrile) and an aqueous buffer, and in most cases different types of hydrophobically modified silica, Cis, or Cs columns are used as analytical columns. 

In NPLC, which refers to the use of adsorption, i.e. liquid-solid chromatography (LSC), the surface of microparticulate silica (or other adsorbent) constitutes the most commonly used polar stationary phase normal bonded-phase chromatography (N-BPC) is typified by nitrile- or amino-bonded stationary phases. Silica columns with a broad range of properties are commercially available (with standard particle sizes of 3, 5 and 10 im, and pore sizes of about 6-15nm). A typical HPLC column is packed with a stationary phase of a pore size of 10 nm and contains a surface area of between 100 and 150m2 mL-1 of mobile phase volume. 

In liquid chromatography, reversed-phase materials such as Cig and Cg are the most commonly used sorbents (429, 430, 434, 438, 446, 447, 453, 454). Examples of baseline separations with reversed-phase columns of several groups of anabolics including stilbenes, resorcyclic acid lactones, and other, frequently used anabolics have been reported (463-466). In addition to reversed-phase separations normal-phase separations of anabolics using either Hypersil (467) and Brownlee (456) silica or diol-modified silica have been reported. Although not all analytes were completely separated, the latter column could be efficiently used to differentiate between estrogenic and androgenic compounds within a mixture of 15 anabolics and their metabolites (468). 

Separation and purification of three turmerones, e.g. ar-turmerone, a- and P-turmerone, from turmeric oil extracted by supercritical carbon dioxide gave 71% purify by weight. Subsequently, purification using a normal-phase silica gel 60 column could separate and purify three major turmerones with 86% purify by weight of ar-turmerone and 81% purity by weight of a- and P-turmerone. These were identified by liquid-solid chromatography, NMR qualification and HPLC quantification, respectively (Li-Hsun Chang et al., 2006). 

In normal-phase chromatography, the retention is governed by the interaction of the polar parts of the stationary phase and solute. For retention to occur in normal phase, the packing must be more polar than the mobile phase with respect to the sample. Therefore, the stationary phase is usually silica and typical mobile phases for normal phase chromatography are hexane, methylene chloride, chloroform, diethyl ether, and mixtures of these. In reverse phase the packing is nonpolar and the solvent is polar with respect to the sample. Retention is the result of the interaction of the nonpolar components of the solutes and the nonpolar stationary phase. Typical stationary phases are nonpolar hydrocarbons, waxy liquids, or bonded hydrocarbons (such as Ci8, Q, etc.) and the solvents are polar aqueous-organic mixtures such as methanol-water or acetonitrile-water. In the strictest interpretation, normal and reverse phase are terms which only relate to the polarity of the column and mobile phase with respect to the sample as shown in Table 3-3 and drawn schematically in Figure 3-14. 

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