The use of novel ionic liquid-in-water microemulsion without the addition of organic solvents in a capillary electrophoretic system.

In this work, a new ionic liquid-in-water (IL/W) microemulsion without requiring toxic organic solvents was investigated as a pseudostationary phase (PSP) in CE. As observed during the IL/W microemulsion system, a fast and an efficient separation of eight phenolic acids was achieved using 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolivmhexa fluorophosphate (bmimPF(6)) as oil drops, Tween 20 as the surfactant, and borate as the BGE. The effects of oil phase, surfactant, buffer and pH on the separation were explored in detail to evaluate the novel PSP. In contrast, the detection efficiency of these same analytes was markedly decreased using oil-in-water (O/W) MEEKC. We have also validated the practicality of the IL/W microemulsion method by quantitative determination of acidic compounds in pharmaceutical injection. The results obtained indicated that an additional association between the IL cations and analytes tested seemed to play a prominent role in the separation mechanism exhibited by this novel PSP compared with the conventional O/W MEEKC.