Interest of a chemometric approach in understanding the retention behaviour of three columns in hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography: application to the separation of glycerol carbonate, glycerol and urea.

A chemometric approach was used to study the retention behaviour of glycerol, urea and glycerol carbonate in hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (HILIC). First, a simplex method was developed to optimize the sensitivity of an evaporative light scattering detector. A mixture design was then applied to model retention factors as a function of the mobile phase content in acetonitrile, water and methanol on three columns: Atlantis HILIC Silica, ZIC-HILIC and Monochrom diol. Atlantis HILIC Silica exhibits predominantly hydrophobic interactions, while retention on the other two columns is mainly ruled by hydrophilic interactions. Finally, a desirability function is applied on the resolution factors. The use of this function enables the compositions of eluent phases to be determined in order to achieve separation between the three chemicals. Monochrom diol proved to be the most efficient column.