Greener Separations with Capillary Liquid Chromatography

The need for “greener” analytical techniques is becoming increasingly important in various industries based on a desire to work towards net-zero emissions. Although the contributions of measurement science may be small relative to other aspects of production in terms of energy consumption and waste generation, every aspect of a workflow must be investigated to minimize the total impact of a given process. In this presentation, we will discuss the impact of transitioning to capillary-scale separations on solvent consumption and waste generation relative to analytical-scale HPLC. Additionally, the use of a compact instrument platform with lower power consumption based on the use of reduced pumps and LED sources for absorbance detection will be described. For many applications in the pharmaceutical industry, results that are comparable to those obtained with larger instruments operated at higher flow rates can be obtained. Additional efforts towards further reducing solvent consumption at this scale by performing fast separations with low overall duty cycle times using novel injection schemes will also be described.