Effect of pressure drop on supercritical fluid chromatography

• Main Author: Gunawan, Stanley.
• Other Authors: Arvind Rajendran
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Science::Chemistry::Analytical chemistry::Chromatography
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/39776
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This report studied the temperature drop along supercritical fluid chromatography column as a result of adiabatic expansion of supercritical CO2 caused by pressure drop concurrent with viscous heat dissipation caused by fluid flow. However, it was observed that conduction through the stainless steel column material was another thermal effect encountered, which established a reverse in temperature profile trend observed in this study. Furthermore, the addition of methanol as modifier did not yield significant impact on the prevailing temperature profile set up solely by supercritical CO2. As conduction was discovered to be dominant in all the experimental results in this study, an equation of energy were proposed to take into account the importance of conductivity through the column wall and column end caps to establish a plausible model that will account for the adiabatic expansion, viscous heat dissipation and conduction in practical uses, such as determination of column and operating parameters to maximize efficiency. These results are important to understand the dynamics of SFC operations.