Utilization of the sol-gel technique for the development of novel stationary phases for capillary electrochromatography on a chip

Capillary electrochromatography (CEC) appears ideally suited for high perfo rmance separations at small scale, i.e. on a chip. Problems with the reprod ucible production of the required mu -HPLC column, but also the lack of com mercially available mu -CEC instruments have prevented many putative applic ants of this promising technique from entering the field. In this paper, a fast and easy way to produce self-containing open-tubular mu -CEC columns ( C-8-moieties for reversed phase applications) by the sol-gel technique is d escribed. The corresponding chips were designed to be compatible with a com mercial system for capillary electrophoresis (namely a Beckman P/ACE 5500 s ystem with diode array detection). Method development and application hence benefited from the injection and the detection options of this setup. The separation of a mixture of three uncharged analytes (polycyclic aromatic hy drocarbons) by the chip is given as example. Under optimized conditions, th e performance of the chip appeared to be comparable or better than that of capillary-based CEC columns of the same kind. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V . All rights reserved.