Practical aspects of the temperature dependence of the activity of uncoated and coated fused-silica columns in gas chromatography

Summary

Uncoated fused-silica capillary tubing has found widespread use in GC and GC/MS, e. g., in splitless and oncolumn injection, in the open-split interface used in GC/MS, and in hybrid fused-silica/glass capillary columns. As the uncoated capillary is usually more active than the coated one, it is very important to pay sufficient attention to the deactivation of the uncoated capillary. Otherwise the uncoated portion used as column inlet and/or outlet may become the main source of column activity and of analytical error. This case is especially serious under temperature-programmed runs. The effect of film thickness and temperature program on column activity is also discussed.