Portable capillary electrophoresis system with LED-absorbance photometric and LED-induced fluorescence detection : Design, characterisation and testing

Capillary electrophoresis (CE) has a wide range of applications in the field of analytical chemistry. In general the most expensive part in a CE system is the detector due to the fact that the detector must have a high sensitivity for small detection volumes and low concentrations. Building portable instruments is one way to make the instruments cheaper and has the advantage that they can be used virtually everywhere. However, downscaling of CE instruments puts some extra demands on the detector. This report describes the design and building of two homemade light-emitting diode (LED) based detectors; a LEDabsorbance photometric detector (LED-AP) and a LED-induced fluorescence (LED-IF) detector. The main goal was to install them inside a portable CE and make a simple separation. The performance of the two detectors had to be evaluated before the main goal could be achieved. p-Nitrophenol was used to create a sensitivity graph for the LED-AP detector, calculating the upper linearity to 5.6 mM when the sensitivity had dropped 10 % caused by non-linearity. The sensitivity graph also showed that the detector had an effective pathlength of 74.2 µm and a stray light of 4.5 % for a 75 µm i.d fused-silica capillary. The LED-IF detector was evaluated by determining the limit of detection (LOD) for fluorescein, at a signal to noise ratio of 3. The LOD was 0.72 µM ± 0.01 µM when immersion oil was used to limit the light scattering from the optic fibres in to the capillary and 0.58 µM ±0.02 µM when silicone oil was used. Without doing any improvements only the LED-AP detector could be used in the portable CE. As a common application area for portable CE instruments is environmental analysis, indirect detection using p-nitrophenol as a probe for separating anions was done to test the system. All analytes were eluted in less than 4 minutes