Forthcoming Thar Webinar on
Supercritical Fluid Chromatography (SFC)

Faster, More Efficient Chiral Separations with SFC

Thomas DePhillipo, Regional Technical Specialist, Thar Instruments, Inc.

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Wednesday 28 January 2009
14:00 UTC / 14:00 GMT / 15:00 CET / 09:00 ET

In the past decade, supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) has experienced a striking resurgence and exponential growth in acceptance, particularly in pharmaceutical and chemical laboratories.

In SFC, a "supercritical" fluid, most commonly CO₂, in combination with one or more polar organic solvents, such as alcohols, are used as mobile phase. Due to the lack of intermolecular interactions, supercritical fluid has lower viscosity and high diffusivity, compared to those of typical solvents used in high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC).

As a result, faster analysis can be achieved without the loss of chromatographic efficiency by SFC.

Furthermore, the polarity of CO₂ is similar to that of hexane, and thereby making SFC a normal phase like chromatographic technique.

The superior resolving power of SFC has distinguished the technique from others when it comes to resolving structurally related compounds and isomers with greater efficiency.