Safer Solvent Blends for Food, Dye, and Environmental Analyses Using Reversed-Phase High Performance Liquid Chromatography

Abstract

Liquid chromatography (LC) is a technique widely used to identify and quantify organic compounds in a complex mixture. Typical operations of high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) involve continuous use of harmful solvents. Replacing these harmful solvents with safer alternatives will provide significant environmental, health, and safety benefits. In this work, a systematic approach for searching safer solvent blends to replace acetonitrile for reversed-phase (RP) HPLC operations is presented. GreenScreen® for Safer Chemicals was used as the first filter to down-select safer solvent candidates from thousands of chemicals based on their safety ratings. A list of LC operation parameters was then employed to determine final solvent candidates. Finally, Hansen Solubility Parameters in Practice (HSPiP) software was utilized to identify the most probable compositions of blends from these solvents for actual LC testing. It was found that a blend of 75% ethanol and 25% methyl acetate by volume provided the chromatograms with the best performance, which had similar response factors and column efficiency compared to acetonitrile when surrogate food additives, dyes, and water pollutants were tested, suggesting that this solvent blend is a potential safer alternative to replace acetonitrile for certain LC applications.