The many faces of packed column supercritical fluid chromatography – A critical review

• Packed column supercritical fluid chromatography is reviewed.
• The difficulties associated with numerous parameters are explained.
• The advantages of low viscosity fluids are enlightened.
• Guidelines for successful method development are provided.
• Numerous selected applications are presented.

Packed column sub- and supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) is a versatile separation method: on the one hand the number of parameters acting on the quality of a separation is very large, and the effects of these parameters can be complex (and not always fully understood). But on another hand, due to numerous advantageous properties of CO2-based mobile phases, method development is a fast task. This paper is a review of the main features of SFC, focusing essentially on achiral separations. However, several fundamental aspects discussed here are also relevant to chiral SFC separations. This is not intended to be an extensive review, as the way to practice SFC has somewhat evolved with time. We rather wished to provide an expert opinion on the characteristics of the method, pointing at the sources of difficulty and displaying the wide possibilities that it offers. A large number of selected applications concerning several different areas are also presented.