Impact of injection solvents on supercritical fluid chromatography

• Zone spreading caused by injected solvent in supercritical fluid chromatography.
• A tool to optimize the efficiency by the choice of injection solvent is presented.
• The properties of solvents are correlated to chromatographic efficiency.
• The resistance in solubility decreases the efficiency.
• Molecular interactions of solvent with solutes and column affect the efficiency.

Even though there has been a rapid development in instrumentation and applications of supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC), relatively little is known about retention mechanisms compared to high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Much effort has been made to characterize the influence of injection solvents on chromatographic efficiency in HPLC, however has been left rather uninvestigated in the domain of SFC. In this study properties of different injection solvents have been studied and correlated with properties of seven various analytes on three different columns, a C18, a 2-ethylpyridine and a bare-silica column. Aided by calculations of correlation coefficients and principal component analysis (PCA), the physical properties of injection solvents and the interactions between injection solvent, solute and stationary phase were investigated. The findings of this work shows that interactions capable of masking accessible silanol groups on a C18 column are of importance in order to maximize the plate number. While solvents with dipolar and hydrogen bond interaction properties are associated negatively with chromatographic efficiency using polar columns. Properties such as molar density, vapor pressure and boiling point were related to sharper peaks, mostly likely because of solubility issues of the injection solvent into the methanol-modified carbon dioxide. However, no additional solubility due to hydrogen interactions between the injection solvent and the carbon dioxide in SFC was observed. Surface tension and viscosity was not particularly associated with a decrease in plate numbers. By increasing the injection volume a stronger correlation between solubility related properties and plate numbers were obtained. Additional experiments showed that the resistance in solubility became an issue when performing partial-loop injection where additional washing solvent entered the system, thus providing broadened peaks.