Chromatography
moleculeoftheday | December 4, 2008Acetonitrile is essential to a lot of chemical analysis - HPLC, or high-performance liquid chromatography, is a workhorse technique for just about anyone who wants to purify on a smallish scale, or see how pure their stuff is. This means pharmaceuticals, prepared foods, agribusiness, fine chemicals, and on and on. We use lots of acetonitrile.
From a recent C&E News:
Acetonitrile is a coproduct of the process used to make acrylonitrile, a building block for acrylic fibers and acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS) resins. An acrylonitrile plant yields 2 to 4 L of acetonitrile for every 100…
moleculeoftheday | May 1, 2007Friday's mention of chromatography got me thinking about HPLC. HPLC, or high-performance (alternately high-pressure) liquid chromatography, is a way of separating mixtures. It can be a pain to do, but there are times when absolutely nothing else will do. You can purify just about anything with it, from small molecules (drugs) to biomolecules.
The most common HPLC is "reversed phase", with a greasy solid phase and a mix of something polar and less polar (typically water and a polar organic solvent, like methanol or acetonitrile). Just the solvents work fine for a lot of small molecules -…