Abnormal phenomenon of the dependence of the retention factors for uncharged species on applied voltage in capillary electrochromatography

Abstract

Polymethacrylate-based monolithic columns were prepared for capillary electrochromatography (CEC) byin situ copolymerization of butyl methacrylate (BMA), 2-acrylamido-2-methyl-1-propanesulfonic acid (AMPS), and ethylene dimethacrylate (EDMA) in the presence of a porogen in fused-silica capillaries of 100 μm I.D. The abnormal phenomenon that retention factors for neutral species decreases with applied voltage in CEC was observed. Capillary electrophoresis (CE) instruments usually require a period of time to increase voltage from 0 kV to desired value, which is called as ramp time. Such ramp time and any error in the determination of dead time should be taken into account during the accurate calculation of retention factors. After the correction of the retention factors, the plots of the corrected factors for alkylbenzene versus applied voltage were made, the absolute value of the plot slopes are less than 1.8×10−4, which indicates that the corrected retention times for neutral species do not show any dependence on applied voltage. Further, the plats of the corrected retention times for acidic and basic compounds versus the reciprocal of applied voltage were drawn, where the target compounds were eluted in neutral form. The very nice linearity of the plots was obtained. The linear correlation coefficients are over 0.999. Here, the slopes of the plots represent\(\frac{{L_{eff} \cdot L_{tot} \cdot \left( {l + k} \right)}}{{\mu eo}}\), which indicates that retention factors for the test compounds are constants under a given separation condition.