Interest of a chemometric approach in understanding the retention behaviour of three columns in hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography: application to the separation of glycerol carbonate, glycerol and urea.

A chemometric approach was used to study the retention behaviour of glycerol, urea and glycerol carbonate in hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (HILIC). First, a simplex method was developed to optimize the sensitivity of an evaporative light scattering detector. A mixture design was then applied to model retention factors as a function of the mobile phase content in acetonitrile, water and methanol on three columns: Atlantis HILIC Silica, ZIC-HILIC and Monochrom diol.