Adsorption Isotherm Determination for Reliable Phase System Characterization in SFC : Challenges and Pitfalls

• Recently the pharmaceutical industry has started to replace HPLC with SFC because of incentives to lower the environmental impact and as well as increasing performance. Reliable characterization of the adsorption processes in SFC, is therefore of utmost importance. The key thermodynamic phase system information is obtained by rigorous determination of adsorption isotherms over a broad concentration range. If properly processed, this data gives not only correct information about the degree of heterogeneity but also the values of the energy of interactions and monolayer capacities of each individual type of adsorption site in the phase system; ultimately, this can result in identification of the types of interactions (dipole-dipole, van der Waals interactions etc.). In this study, we will present the transfer of LC adsorption characterization methods to SFC conditions using several model compounds with several different methods for adsorption isotherm determination traditionally applied with success in LC, and now modified for SFC. We have limited our investigation to methanol as modifier and used the operational conditions, temperature and backpressure most typically observed in industrial settings; in addition, we have used commercial standard SFC-equipment. The results clearly shows that adsorption isotherm determinations in SFC are considerably more complicated than in LC; we will go through the most important pitfalls and give guidelines for more rigorous determinations of adsorption data in SFC. This is an industrial – academic cooperation in the Fundamental Separation Science Group www.separationscience.se

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Kemi -- Analytisk kemi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Chemical Sciences -- Analytical Chemistry (hsv//eng)

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