Variation with Temperature of Phase Ratio in Reversed Phase HPLC for a Methanol/Water Mobile Phase

Abstract

The ratio between the volume of the stationary phase and the void volume of column in HPLC is known as the phase ratio (denoted by Φ). In almost all the thermodynamic studies based on van’t Hoff plots for estimating the values of standard enthalpy and standard entropy, the phase ratio of HPLC column is assumed to be temperature invariant. The validity of this assumption is examined in the present work by studying the variation of Φ with temperature (T) in the range of 20–50 °C for three commercially available C18 columns and two mobile phase compositions methanol/water. A procedure based on proportionality of retention factors k on octanol/water partition coefficients log Kow for several aromatic hydrocarbon homologues was used for the measurement of Φ. Variation of Φ with temperature was previously reported for RP-HPLC separations in an acetonitrile/water mobile phase. However, while for acetonitrile/water mobile phase the effective value of Φ is decreasing as the temperature increases, in the case of methanol/water mobile phase the variation is more complicated. In some cases Φ is decreasing similar to the case of acetonitrile/water mobile phase, but in other cases it decreases up to a point and then shows a slight increase. The study proves that the findings regarding variability of Φ with temperature for the case of acetonitrile/water mobile phase is not an unique effect. In addition, present study evaluates how much the calculation of standard enthalpy and entropy from van’t Hoff plots differ when the variation of Φ with temperature is taken into consideration as compared to the classic approach when Φ is considered a constant.