New Chromatography Columns and Accessories at Pittcon 2009: Part II -

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New Chromatography Columns and Accessories at Pittcon 2009: Part II

Apr 1, 2009
By: Ronald E. Majors
LCGC North America

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Ronald E. Majors

Pittcon 2009, the 60th Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy, was held in the massive McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois, on March 8–13, 2009, the sixth time the Conference has been held there. This year's event hosted nearly 1000 instrument manufacturers and laboratory suppliers in more than 2200 booths. In addition to attending the exposition, the conferees listened to 2500 technical presentations, checked numerous company seminar rooms, or attended one or more of 100 short courses.

Undoubtedly, Pittcon remains the most important yearly international analytical exhibition, where companies introduce their latest instruments, instrument accessories, software, columns, sample preparation equipment, and other consumable products. Because many past attendees have purchased one or more new products within three months after attending the show, most exhibitors attempt to maximize their booth traffic to meet as many potential customers as possible.

The purpose of this report is to provide information about many of the new separation consumables and accessory products that were displayed at Pittcon 2009. In some cases, products that were introduced during 2008 but after Pittcon 2008 (1,2) might be included for reasons of completeness. The information is based upon manufacturers' responses to a questionnaire mailed in December 2008. Because of space limitations and the fact that some manufacturers did not respond to the questionnaire, this report cannot be considered an exhaustive listing of all new products that were introduced in Chicago. However, over the years, these Pittcon introduction summaries have provided a good source of information that would be difficult for one individual to gather during the four days of the exhibition. In addition, the products introduced have shown definite correlations to current research, development, and application activity in the separation sciences.

As in previous years, columns and other products recommended by their manufacturers primarily for biomolecule separations or sample preparation are denoted in the tables with the designation BIO. Some of these products can be used for general high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) separations as well, but their main emphasis is for biological samples.

Table I: Gas chromatography columns

In this month's coverage, I will look at gas chromatography (GC) columns, sample preparation products, and hardware, accessories and kits for chromatography, and sample preparation. Last month, I described new introductions in the areas of HPLC; reversed-phase, normal- and bonded-phase, ion-exchange and ion, size-exclusion, and large- and preparative-scale chromatography; specialty chromatography columns; and thin-layer chromatography (TLC).

Gas Chromatography (GC)

Figure 1

Although GC is considered to be a relatively mature separation technique, new GC columns continue to be introduced each year at Pittcon (Table I), 11 in all for this year. A major portion of the GC columns were the wall-coated open tubular (WCOT) format but this year three new porous layer open tubular (PLOT) columns were shown. PLOT columns contain a thin layer of solid support on the internal surface of a fused-silica or metal capillary. Recent advances have come up with new technologies to ensure that the tiny stationary phase particles do not flake off of the column causing downstream problems such as detection spikes and flow fluctuations. The three PLOT columns introduced by Restek (Bellefonte, Pennsylvania) have molecular sieve, alumina, and porous polymer particles affixed to the capillary surface. PLOT columns are used generally for the separation of small volatile molecules such as solvents, hydrocarbons, and a wide range of gases including permanent gases.

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