Solid Core - Understanding the Technology of Today to Help Design the Particle of Tomorrow

The introduction of liquid chromatography saw the development of two types of stationary phase, fully porous and pellicular. The latter was a technology introduced initially by Horvath [1], and developed at DuPont by Jack Kirkland and others. The development of the pellicular material saw an interesting journey to full commercialisation, although since the successful introduction in 2006 by AMT in a more convenient form for chromatographers, the use of this material has grown substantially. Gaining a full understanding of the mechanism by which these particles work, and also understanding how to improve the synthetic process will be the major challenges over the coming years as this technology becomes more mainstream.

Review of Previous Work

In a previous edition of Chromatography Today [2] there was a wide range of contributions reviewing solid core chromatography particles. These included insights into the benefits of the technology, introducing the concept ‘bar for bar better separations’, as well as an article that suggested that the reports of the death of fully porous media were greatly exaggerated. This provided data which suggested that the efficiencies for a fully porous and a solid core material of the same size were in fact comparable.

Modelling Work

The underlying reasons for the advantages in performance benefits associated with solid core materials has been the subject of much debate and also a high degree of marketing from various manufacturers. In order to better understand how the morphology of solid core particles improves the chromatographic performance, it is necessary to investigate the individual terms of the van Deemter equation [3], to determine the effect of the dispersion of the solute molecules within a packed bed environment. The models to describe this were initially devised by Desmet [4,5] and later mirrored by work from Guiochon [3] and are centred on three key benefits:

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