Synthesis Of Silica-based Crown Ether Stationary Phase And Its Application In High Performance Liquid Chromatography

Crown ether is a macrocyclic system containing multiple oxygen atoms. It has strong non-bonding interaction with some metal ions and organic molecules, to form a supramolecular system. The chromatographic stationary phase containing crown ether structure may display different properties from the traditional stationary phase, such as hydrophilic chromatography, normal phase chromatography and reversed phase chromatography due to its quite special structural characteristics. It may be used in the separation of ion species, special structural compounds, molecular recognition and metal ion enrichment. In this paper, silica based crown ether stationary phase has been successfully prepared by using the click chemistry method. The effect of organic phase content, column temperature, pH of mobile phase and buffer salt concentration on the retention was investigated under reversed phase liquid chromatography conditions (RPLC). The new stationary phase showed good HPLC characteristics which could be applied in the separation polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, regio isomers and macrolide antibiotics. Compared with the C18 stationary phase, the crown ether stationary phase prepared in this study showed better chromatographic performance, appropriate retention time and peak shape when PAHs were used as model compounds. Additional, the retention time and peak order of some analytes on click-crown stationary phase were different from C18 stationary phase. This indicates that the interaction mechanism between the crown ether stationary phase and the sample is quite different from the C18 stationary phase. This stationary phase has chromatographic complementarity with the C18 stationary phase, which makes it possible to construct the two-dimensional chromatogram using the crown ether-C18.Furthermore, when this crown ether stationary phase was utilized in the separation and analysis of fullerene compounds under normal phase chromatographic mode, good searation efficiency and good separation selectivity was achieved.