An absorbance-based micro-fluidic sensor for diffusion coefficient and molar mass determinations

The H-Sensor reported herein is a micro-fluidic device compatible with flow injection analysis (FIA) and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The device detects analytes at two separate off-chip absorbance flow cells, providing two simultaneous absorbance measurements. The ratio of these two absorbance signals contains analyte diffusion coefficient information. A theoretical model for the sensing mechanism is presented. The model relates the signal Ratio to analyte diffusion coefficient. The model is qualitatively evaluated by comparing theoretical and experimental signal Ratio values. Experimental signal Ratios were collected via FIA for a variety of analytes, including sodium azide, benzoic acid, amino acids, peptides, and proteins. Measuring absorbance at multiple wavelengths provides higher order data allowing the analyte signals from mixtures to be deconvolved via classical least squares (CLS). As a result of the H-Sensor providing two simultaneous signals as a function of time for each sample injection, two simulated second-order HPLC chromatograms were generated using experimental H-Sensor data. The chemometric deconvolution method referred to as the generalized rank annihilation method (GRAM) was used to demonstrate chromatographic and spectroscopic deconvolution. GRAM also provides the signal Ratio value, therefore simultaneously obtaining the analyte diffusion coefficient information during deconvolution. The two chromatograms successfully serve as the standard and unknown for the GRAM deconvolution. GRAM was evaluated on chromatograms at various chromatographic resolutions. GRAM was found to function to a chromatographic resolution at and above 0.25 with a percent quantitative error of less then 10%.