Separations of Non-Volatile Components of Fossil Fuels at Very High Resolution and Their Structural Characterization: Progress Report

摘要

The most significant instrumental development of this grant period has been the design and evaluation of a unique spectrofluorometric system based on the photodiode array technology. This high-sensitivity, multi-channel, miniaturized detector may be used for both microcolumn liquid chromatography and capillary supercritical fluid chromatography. The hardware, optical system, and computational capabilities for data storage and display are quite unique. The system was fully evaluated for polycyclic aromatics, azaarenes, phenolics, and other compounds extracted from various fossil fuels. High sensitivity, adequate spectral resolution, and tunable selectivity make this device a very complementary tool for structural elucidation of natively fluorescent molecules. During the aforementioned studies on azaarene and phenolic mixtures, the photodiode fluorescence system was found to be useful in a number of instances where the molecular shape was in question. However, the lack of standard compounds within the high molecular-weight polycyclics remains a serious problem in assigning the correct structures. The details of the detector design features, operational parameters, performance characteristics, and applications can be found in the references given. (ERA citation 12:032450)