Chromatography Forum

Does anyone know of any texts on the basics of open column chromatography using silica and/or alumina for sample preparation during analysis of organic contaminants? Specifically, I am looking for details on activation/deactivation using water to modify the stationary phase. This is a very widely applied technique but there is a lot of variation in the details. Some people use completely activated silica/alumina, others deactivate to a certain degree (e.g. 2 to 10%), but in no case have I ever read of any justification for the procedure in question being used or read any discussion of the effects of varing the degree of deactivation.

Thanks.

AP

The information you seek is in Residue Reviews, volume 16, 1966, pp. 1-29, "Adsorbents and their application to column cleanup of pesticide residues". This series is currently titled "Reviews of environmental contamination and toxicology".

There is some info on this in my book on "HPLC Columns". I used the work of Engelhardt and coworkers for this. These authors used solvents half-saturated with water to get a reproducible and reasonably fast equilibration of silica with the mobile phase.

Thanks for the advice.

AP