Superficially porous particles vs. fully porous particles for bonded high performance liquid chromatographic chiral stationary phases: isopropyl cyclofructan 6.

This work reports a comparison of HPLC separations of enantiomers with chiral stationary phases (CSPs) prepared by chemically bonding cyclofructan-6, functionalized with isopropyl carbamate groups on fully and superficially porous particles (SPPs). The chromatographic performance of the superficially porous CSP based column was compared with columns packed with 5 μm and 3 μm fully porous particles (FPPs). At a flow rate of 3.0 mL/min the number of plates on column afforded by the SPP column was ∼7× greater than the number of plates on column (same length) obtained when using the 5 μm FPP based column. The flow rate providing the highest efficiency separation was ∼1.0 mL/min for the SPP column while it was ∼0.5 mL/min for both FPP columns. It was found that the selectivity and resolution of the separations were comparable between fully porous and superficially porous based columns (under constant mobile phase conditions), even though the SPP column contained lower absolute amounts of chiral selector. When tested under constant retention conditions, the SPP based CSP greatly improved resolution compared to the FPP based columns. At high flow rates the efficiency gained by using superficially porous CSP was accentuated. The advantages of columns based on SPPs become more obvious from the viewpoint of plate numbers and resolution per analysis time.