A closer study of peak distortions in supercritical fluid chromatography as generated by the injection

In SFC the sample cannot be dissolved in the mobile phase, so it is often dissolved in pure modifier, or another liquid, sometimes resulting in serious distortions of the eluted peak profiles already at moderately high injection volumes. It is suspected the reasons for these effects are solvent strength mismatch and/or viscosity mismatch. This study presents a systematic and fundamental investigation of the origin of these peak deformations due to the injection solvent effects in SFC, using both systematic experiments and numerical modeling. The first set of experiments proved that the injection volume and the elution strength of the sample solution had a major impact of the shapes of the eluted peaks. Secondly, the sample band elution profile was numerically modeled on a theoretical basis assuming both un-retained and retained co-solvent injection plugs, respectively. These calculations quantitatively confirmed our first set of experiments but also pointed out that there is also an additional significant effect. Third, viscous fingering experiments were performed using viscosity contrast conditions imitating those encountered in SFC. These experiments clearly proved that viscous fingering effects play a significant role. A new method for determination of adsorption isotherms of solvents was also developed, called the “Retention Time Peak Method” (RTPM). The RTPM was used for fast estimation of the adsorption isotherms of the modifier and required using only two experiments.