Abstract:
Monolithic material is one of the newest chromatographic supports for chromatography. The advantage of monolith is its high porosity resulting in low back pressure. Monoliths have been widely used for both separation and sample preconcentration/extraction purposes. Two investigations of monoliths were carried out in this thesis. The first was the use of monolith as an in-line solid phase extraction for capillary electrophoresis (CE). The second part was an application of monolith for separation of vitamin E in forms of tocopherols and tocopherol acetate by capillary electrochromatography (CEC). In the first part, two monoliths were examined as in-line pre-concentrator column or solid phase extraction (SPE). Performance test of the monolithic SPEs was carried out using three model compounds, terbutaline, 4-hydroxy-3-methoxymethamphetamine and benzyl alcohol. Irreproducible results were observed when passing pure aqueous medium through the monolithic SPEs. Better repeatability was observed when the solutions contained at least 10 % (v/v) organic solvent such as acetonitrile or methanol. However, coupling the SPE with non-aqueous CE mode still could not give good repeatability. In-line coupling of a short packed silica based C18 SPE with CE was also developed. Very good repeatability with a large improvement in sensitivity for this material was demonstrated. In the second part, a pentaerythritol diacrylate monostearate with ethylene dimethacrylate monolith (PEDAS-EDMA), was investigated in order to separate the tocopherol isomers, α-, β-, γ-, and δ-tocopherols, and α-tocopherol acetate as well as the antioxidant butylated hydroxytoluene, by CEC. Retention studies indicated a reversedphase mechanism was involved in the separation on the PEDAS-EDMA column, but polar interactions with the underlying ester and hydroxyl groups enhanced the separation of the problematic β- and γ-isomers. The column showed better selectivity compared to that for conventional packed C18 column. An adequate separation was obtained in 25 min by using 3:10:87 (v/v/v) 100 mM Tris buffer pH 9.3 : methanol : acetonitrile as the mobile phase. The developed method was successfully applied to pharmaceutical samples with good agreement with the labelled value and good repeatability with % recovery between 93 and 99