Retention Behaviour in Micellar Liquid Chromatography

Retention in micellar liquid chromatography is highly reproducible and can be modelled using empirical or mechanistic models with great accuracy to predict the retention changes when the mobile phase composition varies (surfactant and organic solvent concentrations), thus facilitating the optimisation of separation conditions. In addition, the different equilibria inside the column among the solute, the mobile phase, and the modified stationary phase by monomers of surfactant have been exhaustively studied. In a sequential strategy, the retention of the solutes is not known a priori, and each set of mobile phases is designed by taking into account the retention observed with previous eluents. By contrast, in an interpretative strategy, the experiments are designed before the optimization process and used to fit a model that will allow the prediction of the retention of each solute. This strategy is more efficient and reliable. The sequential strategy will be inadequate when several local and/or secondary maxima exist, as frequently occurs in chromatography, and may not give the best maximum, that is to say, the optimum. More often than not, the complexity of the mixtures of compounds studied and the relevant modification of their chromatographic behaviour when changing the mobile phase composition requires the use of computer-assisted simulations in MLC to follow the modifications in the chromatograms in detail. These simulations can be done with sound reliability thanks to the use of chemometrics tools.