Supercritical Fluid Chromatography - Mass Spectrometry System (SFC-MS)

Waters Acquity UPC2 (SFC) with PDA and QDa Mass Spectrometer

Materials Innovation Factory (MIF) | University of Liverpool

Offers a “green,” faster alternative to normal-phase liquid chromatography, with high-resolution separation of isomers, enantiomers, and structural analogs in pharmaceutical and chemical research.

Description

SFC is a chromatographic technique which uses the inexpensive and non-toxic compressed liquid CO2 as a primary mobile phase to separate complicated mixtures. SFC is a relatively new technique which can be classed as convergence chromatography as it combines the ease-of-use of reversed-phase liquid chromatography with the separation power of normal phase chromatography.

SFC allows the user to precisely vary the mobile phase strength, pressure, and temperature to fine-tune the resolving power and selectivity of the system to separate, detect and quantify structural analogs, isomers, enantiomers, and diastereomers. This system is configured with a high-pressure flow cell photo diode array detector (PDA) for sample detection and quantification.

This system can be coupled to either a Triple Quadrupole Detector (TQD) or Quadrupole Time of Flight (QToF) mass spectrometer for improved detection identification. The combined use of a mass spectrometer for peak identification, photodiode array detection for quantification and the ability to fine-tune the method parameters makes this.