ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the strategies for deactivation of packing materials in packed column supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC). The instrumentation was simple but well suited to demonstrate the potentials of employing supercritical fluids as the mobile phase in chromatography. From a practical viewpoint it may be rephrased as: the thermodynamic distribution coefficients of the solutes between the mobile and the stationary phase must show a significant pressure dependence. The use of open-tubular columns with small inner diameters poses extremely stringent requirements on the injection and detection bandwidths in the various forms of open-tubular chromatography. The flow rate can be increased by increasing the column diameter without affecting the column efficiency. As expected, sample loadabilities were observed to be much greater on packed columns. The lower limit of the working range of a chromatographic system is determined by the detection limit. The compatibility of SFC with a wide range of detection systems is an important advantage of SFC over liquid chromatography.
