Retention prediction in reversed-phase liquid chromatography systems with methanol/water mobile phases containing different alkanols as additives

Separation optimization in reversed-phase liquid chromatography by using alkanol additives in the mobile phase: application to amino acids

In an effort to enhance complex mixture separations by using small amounts of a homologous series of alkanols as additives in the mobile phases, it was proposed an optimization algorithm based on a sixth-parameter retention model. This model considers simultaneously the contents of the main organic modifier and of the alkanol additive in the mobile phase as well as of the number of alkyl chain of the additive. This model is in fact a modification of a previously one derived in a recently published paper for the retention description of a mixture of purely hydrophobic alkylbenzenes under isocratic conditions with mobile phases containing alkanol additives. The effectiveness of the new retention model as well as the optimization algorithm was successfully applied to the separation of ten o-phthalaldehyde (OPA) derivatives of amino acids. Indeed, the new retention model exhibited an excellent prediction performance since the obtained overall predictive error between calculated and experimental times was only 2.8% for all isocratic runs by using a variety of mobile phase compositions containing any alkanol homologue even different than those used in the starting/fitting experiments. Moreover, a perfect resolution of the above amino acid mixture was achieved within only 7.4 min in the chromatogram recorded using the optimal mobile phase determined by means of the simple optimization algorithm proposed in this study.

Simple models for the effect of aliphatic alcohol additives on the retention in reversed-phase liquid chromatography

Four retention models for the effect of aliphatic alcohol additives on the retention of analytes in reversed-phase liquid chromatography have been developed following either a semi-thermodynamic treatment or an empirical approach. Their performance was tested using the experimental retention times of six non-polar analytes (alkylbenzenes) and ten o-phthalaldehyde derivatives of amino acids under different isocratic chromatographic runs when a small amount of ethanol, 1-propanol, 1-butanol, 1-pentanol, 1-hexanol or 1-heptanol was added to methanol/water mixtures containing a constant amount of methanol. It was shown that for the structurally simple alkylbenzenes all the models can be adopted for retention prediction with good results. In contrast, just one out of four models, that with the fewest approximations, predicts satisfactorily the retention properties of amino acids derivatives. However, the most interesting feature is that this model can predict the effect of an alcohol-additive on the retention properties of solutes, even if this additive was not used in chromatographic runs done for the fitting procedure, provided that it belongs to the same homologous series of alkanols. This feature is also observed in all models described the retention of alkylbenzenes.