SFC discussion?

[smiley]

anyone here interested in discussion in SFC(supercritical fluid chromatography) applications, especially in pharmaceuticals? there are a lot of articles published in recent years.
or anyone knows if there is board/forum for this kind of discussion on SFC developments and trend?
i have asked some people in Waters, but they seemed know very little about this.
thanks.

[Chris Pohl]

smiley

Sorry, but I can't point you to any good resources on SFC, but a few comments nonetheless:

While it may be true that SFC is a subject of continued academic interest, I'm quite certain that if you plot number of papers on this topic in you'll find that activity is actually significantly diminished relative to that of 10-15 years ago. The fundamental problem with SFC is that there aren't any broadly applicable suitable solvents. Supercritical CO2 has solvent properties roughly analogous to hexane, making it of very limited utility for most applications. Other solvents suitable for supercritical work: nitrous oxide, water, methylene chloride and ammonia all has significant technical or safety issues. There are also significant technical issues associated with the injection and detection process which have not been totally resolved after many years of trying. In total, I would describe the technique as a highly specialized form of liquid chromatography mainly applicable to the specialized cases where supercritical CO2 is actually a good solvent choice. One example of this is the use of supercritical CO2 in the separation of chiral compounds.

[smiley]

thanks, Chris.
generally I agree what you said.
but i work in a pharmaceutical discovery field, where solvent choices has less limitation compared with biochem/biotech fields. the biggert hurdle of SFC is it can not use buffer salts so no good for biomolecules for now.
except that i have seen exponential growth of interests in pharmaceutical fields, because SFC is much faster and better resolving power especially in chiral analysis, where the pharmaceutical industry seems as necessity today.
i have tried SFC with sample dissolved in water and it works well, so practically the CO2 is not 100% as hexane like.
maybe i am at the wrong place to ask this question, since most posts ask about separation on biomolecules with complicated buffers. still i would love to find any place with same interests on SFC.

[kiknos]

hi smiley,

if you find such forum, please kindly inform me about it.

as what i have known, SFC is quite useful and have gotten quite a wide utility in herb oil extraction. i think the very high polarity and boiling point of the analyte of interest would limit SFC.