Experimental evaluation of solvent elution strength in reversed-phase thin-layer chromatography on RP2 and RP8 plates

Abstract

The eluotropic strength on RP2 and RP8 plates was investigated for 7 chromatographic grade solvents miscible with water as a diluent (acetone, acetonitrile, dioxane, ethanol, isopropanol, methanol, and tetrahydrofuran) as well as for water itself. Thirty-five model compounds were used as a test set in the investigation. The use of a modern chemometric mixture design concept allowed separate estimation of each solvent effect from the other results with a relatively small error (about 0.05 of RM value for both adsorbents). Principal component analysis was used as an additional tool and revealed that only one parameter (mean eluotropic strength) is satisfactory to explain the overall variability in the retention datasets. The bootstrapping approach was also used to check the distribution and uncertainty of the obtained values. It can be concluded that all solvents have quite similar elution strength for both adsorbents. The obtained values can be used as a reference during the optimization of thin-layer chro...