Solvent suppression techniques for coupling of size exclusion chromatography and 1 H-NMR using benchtop spectrometers at 43 and 62 MHz

International audienceThe characterisation of polymeric materials in their full complexity of chain length, monomeric composition, branching and functionalization is a tremendous challenge and is best tackled by tailored multi-dimensional coupled analytical and detection techniques. Herein, we focus on the improvement of an affordable but information rich 2D-method for polymer analysis: the online hyphenation of benchtop 1 H-NMR spectroscopy with size exclusion chromatography (SEC). The main benefit of this approach is correlated information of chain length (SEC) to chemical composition (1 H-NMR). Our setup combines SEC onflow with a benchtop NMR spectrometer at 43 or 62 MHz with chemical shift resolution as a robust detector. A detailed comparison of the two instruments is included considering, that only the 43 MHz instrument is equipped with a dedicated z-gradient enabling pulse sequences such as WET