Flow-through pore characteristics of monolithic silicas and their impact on column performance in high-performance liquid chromatography

In order to elucidate the role of the flow-through characteristics with regard to the column performance in high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) native and n-octadecyl bonded monolithic silica rods and columns, respectively of 100 mm length and 4.6 mm ID with mesopores in the range between 10 and 25 nm and macropores in the range between 0.7 and 6.0 μm were examined by mercury intrusion/extrusion, scanning electron microscopy, image analysis and permeability. The obtained data of the flow-through pore sizes and porosity values as well as surface-to-volume ratio of the stationary phase skeleton enabled to predict their influence to the chromatographic separation efficiency. Our data demonstrate that mercury porosimetry is a reliable technique to obtain all the characteristic parameters of the flow-through pores of silica monoliths. An important result of our examination was that the surface-to-volume ratio of monolithic silica skeletons had more significant impact to the separation process, rather than the average flow-through pore sizes. We could also show the essential differences between the particulate and monolithic stationary phases based on theoretical computation. The results, obtained from other characterization methods also indicated the structural complexity of monolithic silica samples. Permeability of columns is a generally applicable parameter to characterize all chromatographic phases no matter the chemistry or format. The correlation coefficient obtained for mercury intrusion and permeability of water was 0.998, though our investigation revealed that the surface modification is more likely influencing the obtained results. Further, the assumption of the cylindrical morphology of flow-through pores is not relevant to the investigated monolithic silica columns. These results on the morphology of the flow-through pores and of the skeletons were confirmed by the image analysis as well. Our main finding is that the flow-through pore sizes are not relevant for the estimation of the chromatographic separation efficiency of monolithic silica columns.