Mixing characteristics of mixers in flow analysis. Application to two-dimensional detection in ion chromatography

Three mixer designs, a back-flow tee mixer (BT), an end-blocked membrane tee mixer (EMT), and a tubular membrane mixer (TM), were fabricated and compared to three commercially available mixers, Visco-Jet Micro mixer (VJM) and HS binary tee mixer with 2 and 10 μL volume (HS-2 and HS-10) mixing cartridges. Internal volumes ranged from 8.3 to 20.3 μL. Performance characteristics were evaluated by the Villermaux-Dushman reaction, noise in baseline conductance upon mixing an electrolyte solution with water, and dispersion/relative dispersion of an injected solute. No single characteristic would uniquely qualify a particular device. In typical postcolumn use when a small reagent flow is added to a principal flow stream using a low-pulsation high-end chromatographic pump, with the worst of these mixers, imperfect mixing accounted for 99.6% of the observed noise. EMT, BT, and TM with asymmetric inlets provided better mixing performances relative to VJM, HS-2, and HS-10 with symmetric inlet ports, especially when the secondary liquid flow rate was much lower than the principal stream-flow rate. Dispersion per unit residence time was singularly large for HS-2. Based on its mixing efficiency and small dispersion, the BT design was found to be the best for practicing postcolumn reaction. As an illustrative application, this was then used to introduce electrogenerated LiOH in a suppressed ion chromatography system to perform sensitive detection of weak acids in a second dimension.