| Abstract: | Xenon is compared to carbon dioxide as a mobile phase for super critical fluid chromatography/Fourier transform infrared spectrometry. The study showed xenon to be comparable to carbon dioxide in terms of resulting chromatography for non-polar analytes. Xenon was confirmed to be a very poor mobile phase, however, for polar analytes. It was determined that small wavenumber shifts in the infrared spectra of probe analytes occurred as either the density or temperature of the mobile phase was increased. The degree of these shifts was often similar for xenon and carbon dioxide. Analyte spectra for five different compounds were produced in both super critical xenon and carbon dioxide and compared to condensed phase and vapor phase library spectra. In all cases, carbon dioxide spectra were readily matched to their corresponding vapor phase spectra, despite having blanked portions of the spectrum due to carbon dioxide infrared absorption. Xenon produced technically superior spectra without such blanked regions, but at a much higher economical cost than carbon dioxide and with no real improvement in terms of library matching. |
