Chromatography Forum

Hellow,

I want to know the stationaty phase of porpak-Q GC packed column and can this stationary phase is similar to PEG phase.

Praveen

The ploymer in Porapak-Q is ethylvinylbenzene-divinylbenzene, which will have different properies from PEG.

Porapak-Q is a porous polymer and has some different characteristics from phases like PEG. A google search on "porapak-Q mechanism" dropped me into a section of a book "The Essence of Gas Chromatography." Give the search a try and see if you get the review section also - it may be of some help.

A search for "porapak-Q adsorbtion partition" dropped me into a portion of "Practical Pharmaceutical Chemistry," which also had some interesting discussion.

I was not able to come up quickly with a nice reference to pass off to you. Someone else may have a nice lead to a discussion of the Porapac stationary phases.

Porapak Q is not a phase, it is a support. It is synthetic 'plastic' co-polymer as Don already described. It is a distribution of different sizes of porous beads, fairly spherical in shape, but containing 'caves and tunnels' throughout. It works primarily in a 'gas-solid' mechanism of retention of fairly small molecules, rarely used for analytes larger than octane.

Waters Corporation owns the patents on this product which was developed by Holister and Hayes of Dow Chemical but was discovered by chemists at Rohm and Haas in the late 50s (early 60s)? Their products was/is called Amberlites.

Rodney George

Thanks you very musch for your reply.

Regards

Praveen