Molecular parameters and retention characteristics of unsubstituted polyaromatic hydrocarbons in HPLC

Summary The present research studies the possibility of using the correlation dependence between molecular parameters of unsubstituted polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and their retention in reversed-phase liquid chromatography to optimize the conditions for the separation and identification of unknown peaks on the chromatograms of multicomponent mixtures. A linear correlation equation, that takes the number and environment of the carbon atom in the PAH molecule into account as well as the differences in the specific interactions of isomeric molecules with polar eluent, has been proposed. The adequacy of the proposed PAH retention model was verified by comparing the calculated retention values with the experimental data. The possibility of identifying unsubstituted PAH according to the number of carbon atoms of various types and according to the values of the molecules lengths (calculated on the basis of the retention of these substances under different eluent compositions) was exemplified by various chromatographic systems (reversed phase-eluent-PAH molecules).