An Extension Of Analyte Detection For Thar SFC: Software Integration Enables SFC-UV-ELSD-TOF Analysis

Jennifer L. Lefler, Thar Instruments

As synthetic routes to create active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) increase in complexity, the analysis of the reaction mixtures becomes more difficult. Chromatographic techniques have been adopted by the pharmaceutical industry to solve analysis and purification problems. The lower viscosity of supercritical fluids, such as carbon dioxide, enables faster flow-rates than HPLC. Also, higher diffusivity yields greater efficiency (smaller plate heights) reducing column length required to resolve a sample. Shorter column lengths and an increase in flowrate greatly reduces chromatographic time, thus supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) is amenable to increasing the throughput of analysis or purification. SFC has, therefore, matured as a technique of choice for pharmaceutical analysts. Hyphenated detection techniques enable analysts to identify the chemical entities in a matrix and determine the relative abundance of desired product or impurity. As SFC matured, so did the sophistication of detection methods. Now, an analyst can gather a significant amount of high resolution data without sacrifice to efficiency or throughput. SFC-UVELSD- TOF is one example of a hyphenated SFC technique that affords an analyst a plethora of information in a timely manner. Such information can be gathered because of the seamless integration of the detectors and Thar Instruments' chromatographic inlet into Waters' MassLynx software package.