On the road toward highly efficient and large volume three-dimensional-printed liquid chromatography columns?

The current performance of commercially packed liquid chromatography columns is limited by the random structure of the packed bed and by the wall-to-center heterogeneity of its structure. The minimum reduced plate heights observed are not smaller than 1.4, whereas they could theoretically be as low as 0.1 for dense and perfectly ordered packings of spheres. To bridge this gap, a wide inner diameter column with an ordered macroporous structure is printed in three dimensions by stereolithography of poly(ethylene glycol diacrylate) resin. Feature sizes below 100 μm are achieved by combining conventional polymer stereolithography with photolithography using photomasks. A layer-by-layer polymerization is performed by alternating two distinct photomasks having horizontally and vertically oriented patterns. Despite the inevitable printing imperfections, minimum reduced plate heights around unity are measured for nonretained analytes. The next challenges for the successful printing of highly efficient and large volume liquid chromatography columns are threefold: reducing the feature size down to below 10 μm, keeping minimum the unevenness of the flow channel dimensions, and tackling additive manufacturing of silica aerogels at such small feature sizes for higher mechanical stability and broader range of retention/selectivity than those delivered by polymer materials.