Progress in packed column supercritical fluid chromatography: materials and methods

This article summarizes recent developments in packed column supercritical fluid chromatography. Silica-based chemically bonded sorbents, similar to t hose used for HPLC, are widely used with solvent-modified fluids containing additives to suppress undesirable solute-sorbent interactions that lead to poor peak shapes. Composition programming is the most useful approach to g radient elution separations since solvent-modified fluids have low compress ibility. Packed column SFC is most useful for the separation of mixtures us ually separated by normal-phase HPLC. Compared to normal-phase HPLC it offe rs faster separations, higher efficiencies, faster column re-equilibration. and a wider range of experimental variables for optimization. Packed colum n SFC is being increasingly selected for the analytical and preparative sep aration of racemic mixtures using enantiomer-selective sorbents. (C) 2000 E lsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.