Effects of eluent temperature and elution bandwidth on detection response for aerosol-based detectors

• Effects of eluent temperature and elution bandwidth on detector response are studied.
• Eluent temperature has little effect on response of ELSD and CCAD.
• Both ELSD and CCAD detectors show increased response as elution bandwidth decreases.
• Use of a temperature gradient gives uniform elution bandwidth and uniform detector response.

Aerosol detectors provide generally uniform response for most analytes, independent of their optical properties, and have the advantage of being compatible with elevated temperature mobile phases. Therefore, aerosol detectors present an attractive detection alternative for high temperature liquid chromatography (HTLC) separations. The present study has investigated the effects of HTLC conditions using aqueous mobile phases on the detection response of an evaporative light-scattering detector (ELSD) and a corona-charged aerosol detector (C-CAD). The response of the ELSD was increased up to 5-fold by increasing the separation temperature from 30 °C to 180 °C. The C-CAD showed much smaller increases in response under the same conditions. This increase in response was found not to result from the increased temperature for the mobile phase but rather from compression of the elution bandwidth at elevated temperature. The effect of bandwidth on detector response was confirmed using flow-injection studies in which the same amount of analyte was introduced into the detector at varying bandwidths. Furthermore, it is shown that a temperature gradient can be used to counteract the effects of varying bandwidths associated with isocratic–isothermal separations, with relatively constant bandwidth and detector response being observed with appropriate temperature gradients. This study demonstrates the necessity to consider the elution bandwidth in HTLC-aerosol detector analysis.