Nanoparticle Analysis by Online Comprehensive Two-Dimensional Liquid Chromatography combining Hydrodynamic Chromatography and Size-Exclusion Chromatography with Intermediate Sample Transformation

Polymeric nanoparticles have become indispensable in modern society with a wide array of applications ranging from waterborne coatings to drug-carrier-delivery systems. While a large range of techniques exist to determine a multitude of properties of these particles, relating physicochemical properties of the particle to the chemical structure of the intrinsic polymers is still challenging. A novel, highly orthogonal separation system based on comprehensive two-dimensional liquid chromatography (LC x LC) has been developed. The system combines hydrodynamic chromatography (HDC) in the first-dimension to separate the particles based on their size, with ultrahigh-performance size-exclusion chromatography (SEC) in the second dimension to separate the constituting polymer molecules according to their hydrodynamic radius for each of 80 to 100 separated fractions. A chip-based mixer is incorporated to transform the sample by dissolving the separated nanoparticles from the first-dimension online in tetrahydrofuran. The polymer bands are then focused using stationary-phase-assisted modulation to enhance sensitivity, and the water from the first-dimension eluent is largely eliminated to allow interaction-free SEC. Using the developed system, the combined two-dimensional distribution of the particle-size and the molecular-size of a mixture of various polystyrene (PS) and polyacrylate (PACR) nanoparticles has been obtained within 60 min.