Metamorphosis of supercritical fluid chromatography to SFC: An Overview

• Modern SFC is all about using CO2 as a solvent in the mobile phase.
• CO2 is non-polar but is completely miscible with a variety of polar solvents.
• This CO2-based chromatography empowers the analysts with some unique features.
• This review describes these unique features of modern SFC.

SFC is expanded as supercritical fluid chromatography, but the chromatography that is currently conducted under the name of SFC are not dependent on supercritical conditions. An SFC practitioner is mostly neither aware of the critical temperatures and pressures of the solvents, nor even require to take any measures to maintain supercriticality. Because, according to the current author, SFC has decisively shifted its focus from using mobile phase in supercritical conditions to using carbon dioxide as mobile phase, mixed with other co-solvents. SFC has discovered the benefits of using compressed CO2 as solvent, which opened up some distinctly different and significantly wide application possibilities for chromatographic analyses as a whole.Here an overview will be provided on how supercritical fluid chromatography metamorphosed to SFC and why SFC may no longer be considered as a technique with some special application scope, rather a complementary tool to some widely accepted analytical techniques e.g. reversed-phase chromatography.