Thermal pretreatments of superficially porous silica particles for high-performance liquid chromatography: Surface control, structural characterization and chromatographic evaluation

• The impact of thermal pretreatment on superficially porous silica was first reported.
• The relation between the silanol types and the chromatographic behavior were studied.
• All the stationary phases were fully characterized by NMR, FTIR, granulometry and SEM.
• Thermal pretreated phases exhibited enhanced thermal stability in HPLC conditions.
• Chemometric tools were used to highlight the different column properties.

This study reports the impact of thermal pretreatment between 400 and 1100 °C on superficially porous silica particles (e.g. core-shell, fused-core; here abbreviated as SPP silica). The different thermally pretreated SPP silica (400 °C, 900 °C and 1100 °C) were chemically bonded with an octadecyl chain under microwave irradiation.The bare SPP silica, thermally untreated and pretreated, as well as the chemically bonded phases (CBPs) were fully characterized by elemental analysis, diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy (DRIFT), and solid state cross polarization magic angle spinning (CP-MAS) 29Si NMR. The chromatographic properties of the overall set of C18-thermally pretreated SPP silica stationary phases were determined using the Tanaka test. Complementary, the simplified Veuthey test was used to deeply study the silanol activity, considering a set of 7 basic solutes with various physicochemical properties. Both tests were also performed on different commercial SPP silica columns and different types of bonding chemistry (C18, Phenyl-hexyl, RP-amide, C30, aQ). Multivariate data analyses (hierarchical cluster analysis and principal component analysis) were carried out to define groups of stationary phases with similar chromatographic properties and situate them in relation to those commercially available. These different C18-thermally pretreated SPP silicas represented a wide range of stationary phases as they were spread out along the score plot. Moreover, this study highlighted that the thermal pretreatment improved the chemical stability of the SPP silica compare to untreated SPP silica and untreated porous silica. Consequently, higher thermal pretreatment can be applied (up to 900 °C) before functionalization without destruction of the silica matrix. Indeed, a significantly lower dissolution of the thermally pretreated SPP silica under aggressive conditions could allow the use of the corresponding functionalized stationary phases at high temperature (60 °C) with good lifetime of the columns.