Evaluation of temperature and pressure effects on retention in supercritical fluid chromatography on polar stationary phases

Abstract

Four polar stationary phases (ethylene-bridged hybrid silica, cyanopropyl, 2-ethylpyridine, and zwitterionic sulfobetaine) have been characterized in supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) by linear free energy relationships (LFER) method with an extended set of Abraham's descriptors. Temperature (25–55 °C) and pressure (110–180 bar) effects on analyte retention, separation selectivity and LFER-coefficients of chromatographic systems have been studied using the 89 test compounds of various chemical classes and carbon dioxide – methanol (9:1 v/v) binary solvent as a mobile phase.It was found that for the selected stationary phases temperature and pressure had only moderate effects on selectivity. The retention times of all analytes decrease, as can be expected, if the pressure rises at the isothermal conditions due to the increase of the fluid density and its eluting power. The effect of temperature on retention is complicated and depends both on the chemical class of analyzed compounds and the stationary phase type.Temperature and pressure variations lead to small changes in the LFER-coefficients, and general trends observed do not depend much on the stationary phase type. It may be difficult to interpret the LFER-analysis results because of the evident, more significant chromatographic phenomena.