ABSTRACT
This chapter overviews the state of the art of supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) in petroleum applications including the most recent works and a comparison of SFC with other techniques. For petroleum applications, obviously, the very best feature of SFC is the combination of Gas chromatography (GC) detectors to a good solvating mobile phase. Open tubular capillary column SFC was the first alternative to GC to be explored since it can be more or less considered as a mimic of the GC simulated distillation. As a matter of fact, SFC with capillary columns requires particular attention to the injection mode due to the low capacity of the column and the introduction of a sample into a highly pressurized system. Hydrocarbon group-type analysis refers to the separation and quantitation of saturates, olefins, aromatic hydrocarbons and polar compounds in petroleum products. For the application to a wide range of commercial gasolines, a minimum condition is that 1-butene should be eluted after decane.
