Rapid analysis of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are a continuing environmental and health concern. The analytical methods developed to analyze this class of compounds have relied on reversed phase liquid chromatography and are often on the order of tens of minutes. Reduction in analysis times through the application of sub-2 μm fully porous and superficially porous support materials can increase the throughput of these LC separations. Herein, we demonstrate similar selectivity between a fully porous 1.8 μm and a 2.7 μm superficially porous material. Separations were individually developed with in silico modeling for a given flow rate determined by the fully porous column's backpressure requirements. Since the 2.7 μm superficially porous materials inherently require less backpressure to achieve similar levels of efficiency as the 1.8 μm fully porous materials, a marked increase in throughput is possible with elevated flow rates. Good resolution for a standard 16-component sample mixture is demonstrated in a sub-minute separation.