Performance of single particle fritted capillary columns in electrochromatography

Development of capillary electrochromatography (CEC) largely depends on column technology. The past ten years or so have seen a great number of CEC works performed on monolithic columns, due to simplicity and robustness in column fabrication. Monolithic columns eliminate the issue of column fritting, which conventionally made particle-packed capillary columns fragile and introduced nonuniformity to the chromatographic bed. The particulate packing material, however, is still a popular type of stationary phase widely used in CEC, as the rich library of HPLC packing material provides a wide range of choices for chromatographic separations performed in electrodriven mode. In this study, we investigated a purely physical fritting method, single particle fritting technology, to immobilize particulate chromatographic material inside capillary tube in a sinter-free manner to produce robust capillary columns. Single particle fritted columns present significantly improved column-to-column reproducibility (n=10) in peak efficiency, retention factor, peak area and asymmetry (%RSD=5.4, 7.7, 6.2 and 6.1, respectively, at 26 kV), enabling their practical application in high throughput parallel analysis using multiple columns.