ABSTRACT
Although supercritical fluids have been known since the
nineteenth century, they have been used as chromato-
graphic mobile phases only since 1962 (Klesper et al.,
1962). At first, supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC)
(Anton and Berger, 1998; Berger, 1995; Lee and Markides,
1990; Parcher and Chester, 1999; Saito et al., 1994a) was
done exclusively with packed columns [e.g., (Gere, 1983;
Giddings et al., 1968; Gouw and Jentoft, 1972; Jentoft
and Gouw, 1972)]. During the 1980s the focus shifted
to wall-coated, open-tubular (OT, or sometimes called
capillary) columns as 50 mm inside-diameter (i.d.) fusedsilica columns became available, having grown from gas-
chromatography (GC) technology (Novotny et al., 1981).
In the 1990s, interest and energy returned to packed
columns, particularly after the introduction of new instru-
ments with postcolumn pressure control (Anton et al.,
1991; Berger, 1992; Verillon et al., 1992), and with business
interests in that decade focusing strongly on speed and
cost reduction. Currently, packed columns are favored in
applications requiring high-speed analyses and with
large sample loads, particularly pharmaceutical work.
OT-SFC is often preferred for low-temperature or high-
molecular-weight, gas-chromatography-like separations
requiring flame-ionization or other GC-like detection capa-
bilities, particularly petroleum applications. This chapter
will describe the fundamentals of SFC, instrumentation
