Chromatography Applications

Gas chromatography has an entirely different field of applications to that of liquid chromatography. In general, gas chromatography is used for the separation of volatile materials and liquid chromatography for the separation of involatile liquids and solids. There are certain compounds, however, that can be separated with either techniques, and more importantly, many involatile substances such as amino acids, steroids and high molecular eight fatty acids can be derivatized to form volatile substances that can be separated by GC. The derivatization must be highly reproducible and usually proceed to completion in order to maintain adequate accuracy. The capillary columns in GC can have much higher efficiencies than their LC counterpart and thus GC can more easily handle multi-component mixtures such as essential oils. On the other hand, only LC can separate the peptides, polypeptides, proteins and other large biopolymers that are important in biotechnology.

Gas Chromatography Applications

The most common hydrocarbon analysis carried out by GC is probably that of gasoline. The analysis of gasoline is typical of the type of sample for which GC is the ideal technique. It is this type of multi-component mixtures containing very similar compounds that need the high efficiencies available from GC for a successful analysis. The separation of a sample of gasoline carried out on a long open tubular column is shown in figure 35. It is clear that the column had a very high efficiency that was claimed to be in excess of 400,000 theoretical plates. The column was 100 m long and only 250 mm I.D., carrying a film of the stationary phase, Petrocol DH, 0.5 mm thick. Petrocol DH is specially designed stationary phase for the separation of hydrocarbons and consists of bonded dimethylsiloxane, a very dispersive type of stationary phase, retaining the solutes approximately in the order of their increasing boiling points.

Non-polar or dispersive stationary phases are employed for the separation of hydrocarbons (e.g. OV101, which is also a polyalkyl-siloxane, is widely used in packed columns). The flow velocity of 20 cm/sec., appears to have been taken from the ratio of the column length to the dead time. Thus, due to the pressure correction the actual effective linear velocity would be much less than that (see Book 7 Peak Dispersion in Chromatographic Systems). Helium was used as the carrier gas that was necessary to realize the high efficiencies with reasonable analysis times.