SummaryA screening method using nonaqueous capillary electrophoresis (NACE) has been developed for purity analysis of pyridinyl-methyl-sulfinyl-benzimidazoles (PMSB). Eight different polar organic solvents were tested as background electrolytes. N-Methylformamide (NMF) was found to have the best properties in respect of both electrophoretic behavior and high solubility of five different model compounds. Optimization of the CE separation with regard to the effects of addition of various electrolyte modifiers is reported. An additional feature of amide solvents, rarely utilized in CE, is their intrinsic basic nature; this is of particular interest for analysis of compounds such as the PMSB, the degradation of which is acid-catalyzed. It is shown here that these compounds are stable at room temperature for weeks in NMF solution. Results from quantitative application of the NACE method were highly precise (typically 1.8 % RSD for normalized peak area); linearity was good and detection limit in drug purity determination was low (-0.05 area % relative to the drug compound).

Flow control is central to microfluidics and chromatography. With decreasing dimensions and high pressures, precise fluid flows are often needed. In this paper, a high-pressure flow control system is presented, allowing for the miniaturization of chromatographic systems and the increased performance of microfluidic setups by controlling flow, composition, and relative permittivity of two-component flows with CO 2 . The system consists of four chips: two flow actuator chips, one mixing chip, and one relative permittivity sensor. The actuator chips, throttling the flow, required no moving parts as they instead relied on internal heaters to change the fluid resistance. This allows for flow control using miniaturized fluid delivery systems containing only a single pump or pressure source. Mobile phase gradients between 49% and 74% methanol in CO 2 were demonstrated. Depending on how the actuator chips were dimensioned, the position of this range could be set for different method-specific needs. With the microfluidic control board, both flow and composition could be controlled from constant pressure sources, drift could be removed, and variations in composition could be lowered by 84%, resulting in microflows of CO 2 and methanol with a variation in the composition of ±0.30%.

In microfluidics, a well-known challenge is to obtain reproducible results, often constrained by unstable pressures or flow rates. Today, there are existing stabilisers made for low-pressure microfluidics or high-pressure macrofluidics, often consisting of passive membranes, which cannot stabilise long-term fluctuations. In this work, a novel stabilisation method that is able to handle high pressures in microfluidics is presented. It is based on upstream flow capacitance and thermal control of the fluid’s viscosity through a PID controlled restrictor-chip. The stabiliser consists of a high-pressure-resistant microfluidic glass chip with integrated thin films, used for resistive heating. Thereby, the stabiliser has no moving parts. The quality of the stabilisation was evaluated with an ISCO pump, an HPLC pump, and a Harvard pump. The stability was greatly improved for all three pumps, with the ISCO reaching the highest relative precision of 0.035% and the best accuracy of 8.0 ppm. Poor accuracy of a pump was compensated for in the control algorithm, as it otherwise reduced the capacity to stabilise longer times. As the dead volume of the stabiliser was only 16 nL, it can be integrated into micro-total-analysis- or other lab-on-a-chip-systems. By this work, a new approach to improve the control of microfluidic systems has been achieved.