Preparation of a sulfonated fused-silica capillary and its application in capillary electrophoresis and electrochromatography

In the present paper, two new methods, sol–gel and chemical bonding methods, were proposed for preparation of sulfonated fused-silica capillaries. In the sol–gel method, a fused-silica capillary was coated with the sol solution obtained by hydrolysis of 3-mercaptopropyltrimethoxysilane (MPTS) and tetramethoxysilane, and followed by age; while in the chemical bonding method, a capillary was chemically bonded directly with MPTS. Then, both the resulting capillaries were oxidized with an aqueous solution of hydrogen peroxide solution (H2O2) (30%, m/m) to obtain the sulfonated capillaries. The electroosmotic flow (EOF) for the sulfonated capillaries was found to remain almost constant within the studied pH range, and greater than that of the uncoated capillary. However, the coating efficiency of the capillary prepared by chemical bonding method was higher than that by sol–gel method, by comparing their magnitude of the EOF, the degree of disguise of the silanol and reproducibility of preparation procedure. The effects of the electrolyte’s concentration and the content of methanol (MeOH) on the EOF were also studied. Especially, the study of the apparent pH (pH∗) on the EOF in a water–MeOH system was reported. Finally, capillary electrophoretic separation of seven organic acids was achieved within 6.5 min under optimal condition using the chemically bonded sulfonated capillary. Moreover, separation of four alkaloids on the sulfonated capillary was compared with that on uncoated capillary in different conditions. Ion-exchange mechanism was found to play a key role for separation of these four basic analytes on the sulfonated capillary.