Instrumentation for hand-portable liquid chromatography.

Liquid chromatography (LC) has lagged behind gas chromatography (GC) in developments related to hand-portable instrumentation. In this work, a new battery-operated (24V DC) nano-flow pumping system with a stop-flow injector was developed and integrated with an on-column UV-absorption detector (254nm) that was reduced in size to an acceptable weight and power usage for field operation. The pumping system, which includes nano-flow pump, stepper motor and high-pressure valve weighs only 1.372kg (3lbs) and can generate up to 110.32MPa (16,000psi) pressure. A major advantage of this pump is that it does not employ a splitter, since it was specifically designed for capillary column use. The volume capacity of the pump is 24µL, and a sample volume as low as 10nL can be injected. Flow rate calibration (300nL to 6.12µL per min) was performed, and an accuracy >99.94% was obtained. The percent injection carry-over was found to be low (RSD 0.31%), which makes it practical for quantitative analysis. The detector linear range and limit of detection (LOD) were determined using sodium anthraquinone-2-sulfonate. A linear regression coefficient (R) of 0.9996 was obtained for a plot of log peak area versus log concentration over the range of 3.2µM to 6.5mM, and the LOD (S/N=3) was found to be 7.8fmol (0.13µM). The short term noise of the detector is comparable to commercially available detectors (∼10(-5)AU). In this work, the system was tested in the laboratory using regular line power (120V AC) with an AC to DC adapter. Reversed-phase isocratic separations were performed using a 15.5cm×75µm i.d. fused silica capillary column containing a monolithic stationary phase synthesized from 1,6-hexanediol dimethacrylate. Good retention time repeatability (RSD 0.09-0.74%) was obtained for a mixture containing an unretained marker (i.e., uracil) and a homologous series of alkyl benzenes.

A comparison study of in-column and on-column detection for electrochromatography.

Duplex capillary columns, the standard for electrochromatography using optical detection, consist of a packed and an open section. Normally, optical detection is performed in an on-column manner, i.e. at a point right after the packed section. It was deemed that band broadening may take place when an analyte band travels from the packed bed, through the frit and down to the open section. In this study, without using any sintering steps for fritting or window creation, robust packed capillary columns were prepared using transparent capillaries based on single particle fritting technology. The detection point could be easily shifted by simply sliding the transparent column against the ultraviolet (UV) beam. In this way, the band broadening effect was directly evaluated as a function of the detection point, which was positioned before or after the end frit. The consistent van Deemter curves recorded indicate that there was no efficiency difference between the positions investigated. The result proved that the significant band broadening effect previously observed via on-column detection should be caused by the sintered frit used, while the single particle frit made through a purely physical process did not lead to efficiency degradation. The conservative separation performance recorded at different positions around the column's end also suggests the applicability of on-line tandem detection strategy, e.g. UV followed by mass spectrometry (MS), on the same capillary column, which should be a promising approach to mining multiplex detection information from a single microseparation process.