Roles of Organic Modifiers in Micellar Electrokinetic Capillary Chromatography

In the present work, four organic modifiers, viz. urea, dioxane, methanol, and tetrahydrofuran, were comparatively and systematically studied in terms of their effects on electrokinetic migration behavior and the retention mechanism of homologous solutes in MECC. The results showed that the electroosmotic mobility, μ_eo, and the electrophoretic mobility of a micelle, μ_ep,mc, decrease linearly with increasing organic modifier concentration. The ability of organic modifiers to lower μ_eo is greater than their ability to lower μ_ep,mc. The negative values of the slopes of these linear relationships, D_eo and D_ep,mc, increase along the series the order urea < methanol < dioxane < tetrahydrofuran. The logarithm of the capacity factor (ln k′) of uncharged homologous solute, which is mainly determined by the hydrophobic interaction, decreases linearly with increasing organic modifier concentration, due not only to the decrease in the partition coefficient but also to the decrease in the phase ratio. A linear relationship was observed between the slope of the plot of ln k′ vs. organic modifier concentration and the carbon number of homologous compound. The slope of such a relationship can characterize the hydrophobicity of the organic modifier. The hydrophobicity of such organic modifiers is also found to increase along the series urea < methanol < dioxane < tetrahydrofuran.