Calibration of an evaporative light-scattering detector as a mass detector for supercritical fluid chromatography by using uniform Poly(ethylene glycol) oligomers

The quantitativeness of an evaporative light-scattering detector (ELSD) for supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) was evaluated by using an equimass mixture of uniform poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) oligomers. Uniform oligomers, in which all molecules have an identical molecular mass, are useful for the accurate calibration of detectors. We calibrated the SFC-ELSD system for various concentrations and molecular masses by using an equimass mixture of PEG oligomers. ELSD not only showed a good linear response to the injected concentration over a wide concentration range, from 10−4 to 10−1 g/mL, but also showed a strong dependence on the molecular mass of the solute. By using chromatograms of the equimass mixture of uniform oligomers to calibrate SFC-ELSD, it was possible to determine exact values of not only the average mass but also the molecular-mass distribution for a PEG 1540 sample. The average molecular mass was shifted to a higher value by several percentage points after calibration of the ELSD.