Chemometric evaluation of the combined effect of temperature, pressure, and co-solvent fractions on the chiral separation of basic pharmaceuticals using actual vs set operational conditions.

The need to determine the actual operational conditions, instead of merely using the set operational conditions, was investigated for in packed supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) by design of experiments (DoE) using a most important type of compounds, pharmaceutical basics, as models. The actual values of temperature, pressure, and methanol levels were recorded and calculated from external sensors, while the responses in the DoE were the retention factors and selectivity. A Kromasil CelluCoat column was used as the stationary phase, carbon dioxide containing varying methanol contents as the mobile phase, and the six racemates of alprenolol, atenolol, metoprolol, propranolol, clenbuterol, and mianserin were selected as model solutes. For the retention modeling, the most important term was the methanol fraction followed by the temperature and pressure. Significant differences (p<0.05) between most of the coefficients in the retention models were observed when comparing models from set and actual conditions. The selectivity was much less affected by operational changes, and therefore was not severely affected by difference between set and actual conditions. The temperature differences were usually small, maximum ±1.4°C, whereas the pressure differences were larger, typically approximately +10.5bar. The set and actual fractions of methanol also differed, usually by ±0.4 percentage points. A cautious conclusion is that the primary reason for the discrepancy between the models is a mismatch between the set and actual methanol fractions. This mismatch is more serious in retention models at low methanol fractions. The study demonstrates that the actual conditions should almost always be preferred.

Investigation of plateau methods for adsorption isotherm determination in supercritical fluid chromatography.

The Perturbation Peak (PP) method and Frontal analysis (FA) are considered as the most accurate methods for adsorption isotherms determination in liquid chromatography. In this study we investigate and explain why this is not the case in Supercritical Fluid Chromatography (SFC), where the PP method does not work at all, using a modern analytical system. The main reason was found to be that the solute to be studied must be dissolved in the MeOH reservoir before it is mixed with CO2. Since the solute occupies a certain partial volume in the reservoir, the larger the solute content the larger this fractional volume will be, and the final MeOH fraction in the mobile phase will then be smaller compared to the bulk mobile phase without solute in the modifier. If the retention of small injections on the concentration plateaus, i.e., "analytical-size" perturbation peaks, is sensitive to small variations of MeOH in the eluent, this will seriously decrease the accuracy of the PP method. This effect was verified and compensated for and we also demonstrated that the same problem will occur in frontal analysis, another concentration plateau method.