Comparison of experimental and simulated separation performance in capillary tube-in-manifold devices

• Development of a tube-in-manifold device for capillary LC. • Design allows for circular cross-section and frits in microfluidic LC device. • Initial chromatographic results of packed bed demonstrate plate counts above 7000. A metal tube-in-manifold packed bed capillary column device, designed to overcome common limitations associated with capillary LC separations, is described. Experimental results of initial packing tests with sub-3 μm core-shell particles demonstrated efficiencies greater than 47,000 plates/m for a separation performed using the column device. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling of the multicomponent separation used for this work was validated against experimental LC results and the optimized model was able to effectively predict component peak retention times. However, the accuracy of predicted efficiencies requires further refinement. The tube-in-manifold design demonstrates that packed capillary columns with cylindrical cross-sectional channel geometry and ultrahigh pressure, low dead volume fluidic connections are achievable.