Additives Supercritical fluid chromatography

The most common mobile phase for supercritical fluid chromatography is CO2. Its low critical temperature, 31 °C, and critical pressure, 72.9 atm, are relatively easy to achieve and maintain. Although supercritical CO2 is a good solvent for nonpolar organics, it is less useful for polar solutes. The addition of an organic modifier, such as methanol, improves the mobile phase s elution strength. Other common mobile phases and their critical temperatures and pressures are listed in Table 12.7. 

An on-line supercritical fluid chromatography-capillary gas chromatography (SFC-GC) technique has been demonstrated for the direct transfer of SFC fractions from a packed column SFC system to a GC system. This technique has been applied in the analysis of industrial samples such as aviation fuel (24). This type of coupled technique is sometimes more advantageous than the traditional LC-GC coupled technique since SFC is compatible with GC, because most supercritical fluids decompress into gases at GC conditions and are not detected by flame-ionization detection. The use of solvent evaporation techniques are not necessary. SFC, in the same way as LC, can be used to preseparate a sample into classes of compounds where the individual components can then be analyzed and quantified by GC. The supercritical fluid sample effluent is decompressed through a restrictor directly into a capillary GC injection port. In addition, this technique allows selective or multi-step heart-cutting of various sample peaks as they elute from the supercritical fluid... 

Enantioselective separation by supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) has been a field of great progress since the first demonstration of a chiral separation by SFC in the 1980s. The unique properties of supercritical fluids make packed column SFC the most favorable choice for fast enantiomeric separation among all of the separation techniques. In this chapter, the effect of chiral stationary phases, modifiers, and additives on enantioseparation are discussed in terms of speed and resolution in SFC. Fundamental considerations and thermodynamic aspects are also presented. 

Another technique is supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC), which is a chromatographic technique that in many ways is a hybrid of GC and HPLC. It is recognized as a valuable technique for the analysis of thermolabile compounds, which would not be amenable to analysis by GC or HPLC. Few applications have been reported for SFC in the field of OCP and OPP determination (16). The advantages reported for SFC are versatility in separation (by the addition of modifier or the choice of stationary phase) and detection (with LC or GC detectors). However, SFC is a little-used technique because it still presents a wide range of instrumental problems (14-16). 

Mobile fluid interaction with the stationary phase in SFC was investigated with mass spectrometric tracer pulse chromatography (96). Using capillary supercritical fluid chromatography, the effect of methanol as an additive was studied on the partition behavior of n-pentane into 5 % phenylmethylsilicone stationary phase. The results showed that the mobile fluid uptake by the stationary phase decreased with increasing temperature and pressure. Thus suggests that stationary phase swelling, may occur in SFC. 

In addition to high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), the chiral resolution using CMPAs was also carried out by supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) [91] and capillary electrochromatography (CEC) [92-98]. Salvador et al. [91] used dimethylated /1-cyclodextrin as the mobile phase additive on porous graphite carbon as the solid phase for the chiral resolution of tofizopam, warfarin, a benzoxazine derivative, lorazepam, flurbiprofen, temazepam, chlorthalidone, and methyl phehydantoin by SFC. The authors also studied the effect of the concentration of dimethylated /1-cyclodextrin, the concentration of the mobile phase, the nature of polar modifiers, outlet pressure, and the column temperature on the chiral resolution. 

Recently additional measurements on some of these anthraquinone dyes were carried out with a dynamic method using a supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) technique. This method permits the measurement of solubilities as well as the continuous purification from better soluble impurities which might cause serious errors in the solubility data (see section 3.). 

In addition to conventional liquid chromatography, supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC), using a supercritical fluid as mobile phase (mostly scf-C02), has attracted attention in the last decades [58, 164, 168, 169]. Supercritical fluids provide a favourable medium for the transport of solutes through a chromatographic column because they resemble a gas in terms of viscosity, a liquid in terms of density, and are intermediate between these two phases in terms of diffusivity. For some physieal properties of supercritical solvents, see Section 3.2. 

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