| AVS 66th International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| MEMS and NEMS Group | Monday Sessions |
| Session MN-MoA |
| Session: | Microfabricated Systems for Gas Chromatography and Nanomechanical Mass Sensing |
| Presenter: | Gert Desmet, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
The present contribution aims at illustrating and demonstrating how micro-machining technology can give a boost to High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC). Currently, HPLC is routinely used in nearly every chemical analysis lab. Despite its high degree of maturity, the technique however suffers from serious performance limitations when faced to the complex samples that need to be separated to solve the current state-of-the-art problems in the biological and pharmaceutical research (e.g., proteomics and metabolomics), the food and environmental analysis, etc.
The currently used packed bed HPLC columns are clearly underachieving because of the packing disorder and the concomitant large degree of band broadening. To solve this packing disorder problem, the present contribution will focus on the possibilities of advanced photolithographic etching techniques such as the Bosch-process to produce perfectly ordered porous support columns with optimized hydrodynamic shape and optimized external porosity.
At the conference, we will demonstrate the possibility of rapid multi-component separations and the possibility to achieve very high separation efficiencies with a microfabricated column in pressure-driven liquid chromatography. In addition, we have also extended the concept to gas chromatography (GC), where the micromachining allows to make designs that combine fast separation kinetics with a high mass loadability, two factors with opposite requirements in the current commercial format for GC.