Improved separation of micro gas chromatographic column using mesoporous silica as a stationary phase support

Fan Luo; Bin Zhao; Fei Feng; Lei Hou; Wenbin You; Pengcheng Xu; Haimei Zhou; Xinxin Li

doi:10.1016/j.talanta.2018.06.020

Improved separation of micro gas chromatographic column using mesoporous silica as a stationary phase support

Talanta. 2018 Oct 1:188:546-551. doi: 10.1016/j.talanta.2018.06.020. Epub 2018 Jun 7.

Authors

Fan Luo¹, Bin Zhao², Fei Feng³, Lei Hou², Wenbin You², Pengcheng Xu², Haimei Zhou², Xinxin Li²

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Transducer Technology, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200050, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Transducer Technology, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200050, China.
³ State Key Laboratory of Transducer Technology, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200050, China. Electronic address: fengfei507@mail.sim.ac.cn.

PMID: 30029411
DOI: 10.1016/j.talanta.2018.06.020

Abstract

In this paper, a novel and facile way to improve the separation of micro gas chromatographic column is presented which utilizes the mesoporous silica thin film as the stationary phase support. A serpentine semi-packed column is fabricated based on a micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) technology and polydimethylsiloxane is used as the stationary phase. The chromatographic resolution of C6-C7 increases from unseparated to 7.44 after depositing mesoporous silica thin film as the stationary phase support in the separation of a mixture of heavy hydrocarbons (C6-C10), and the separation efficiency is as high as 9290 plates/m. Meanwhile, in the separation of a mixture of benzene series (gas mixtures of benzene, toluene and paraxylene), the chromatographic resolution of benzene and toluene can also be increased by 483%. Those outstanding results indicate that using the mesoporous silica as the stationary phase support is an effective way to improve the separation efficiency of the gas chromatographic column.

Keywords: MEMS; Mesoporous silica; Micro gas chromatography column; Stationary phase support.