| Abstract [eng] |
Nowadays silica gel is the most important and most widely used material in chromatography as a column filament in liquid chromatography. Silica gel is widely used due to its important physicochemical properties: controlled porosity and morphology, physical and chemical stability, easy and reproducible surface modification. Meanwhile, silica gel-loaded columns are in high demand in liquid chromatography due to a number of features such as: easy loading, fast mass transfer, high analytical repeatability. There is also an increasing demand nowadays for silica gel as a filler material, which not only possess above mentioned properties, but is also smaller than 5 μm and has the lowest possible heavy metal content. Such high quality silica gel is in high demand because using this media loaded columns in UHPLC systems allows for very high analyte separation efficiencies, theoretical plate counts, reduced analysis time by using high mobile phase passage rates through the column, reduced detection limit, lower limit of quantification, and thus even better reproducibility of analyses. One of the biggest challenges for the high quality silica gel produced in this work is the variation in the physical parameter namely particle pore volume. Often in manufacturing this parameter has too high value, resulting in a low quality product. In this work, synthesis and surface modification of a high performance silica gel has been carried out. An analysis of the hydration and high-temperature annealing steps was carried out, and the optimum production conditions were found on the basis of morphological, structural and chromatographic studies. |
