Exploitation of a microporous organic polymer as a stationary phase for capillary gas chromatography

Microporous organic polymers (MOPs) have emerged as a new class of functional porous materials with unique characteristics and potential uses in diverse areas. However, the field of MOPs for gas chromatographic (GC) separations has not been well explored. Herein, a MOP namely KAPs-1 was dynamic coated onto a capillary column for the first time. The fabricated column exhibited a nonpolar nature and the column efficiency for n-dodecane was up to 7769 plates m(-1). The KAPs-1 coated column showed high GC separation performance for a series of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) including the challenging ethylbenzene and xylene isomers, which could not be resolved at baseline on the commercial 5% phenyl polysiloxane stationary phase. Moreover, the relative standard deviations for five replicate determinations of the studied analytes were 0.0-0.6%, 0.9-3.2%, 1.1-5.9%, 0.8-3.7% for retention time, peak area, peak height and peak width, respectively. To investigate the interaction between some analytes and the stationary phase, thermodynamic and kinetic parameters were also evaluated. The results of this study show it is very promising to utilize MOPs as stationary phases for capillary GC.