Theoretical study on the impact of slip flow on chromatographic performance

• We investigated band broadening under slip flow conditions.
• We used computational fluid dynamics to measure plate heights.
• Slip flow chromatography only slightly influences the total plate height.
• Slip flow does not eliminate the mobile phase band broadening contribution.

We used numerical simulations to investigate the recent observation that slip flow chromatography can obtain reduced plate heights as low as 0.032. The simulations were carried out for a 2D pillar array and a 3D face centred cubic particle stacking. We found that slip flow can only affect the mobile phase mass transfer contribution, which reduces the minimal total plate height by no more than 0.02 reduced plate height units for totally porous particles. Slip flow by itself can thus not fully explain the observed extremely low plate height values and further research is necessary to understand these results.