Portable and modular liquid chromatography for pharmaceutical industry

A state-of-the-art miniaturised and field-portable liquid chromatography (LC) system has been developed for use in the pharmaceutical sector. Developments on the instrumentation included (1) a small-footprint high-pressure pumping system that allows fast LC separation, (2) integration of an auto-sampling interface that enables automatic injection and cleaning, (3) utilisation of high-efficiency LC columns for fast separation, (4) adoption of robust and versatile detection approaches with superior sensitivity. The first phase of development involved the integration and performance testing of a fully automated hand-portable capillary LC system with a total weight of ~2.7 kg. This portable LC integrated multiple small footprint LC components within a 3D-printed enclosure, including a modular microfluidic system with automatic injection, column heater, and low-UV light emitting diode (LED) based Z-cell absorbance detector. This portable LC when used with a 5 µm C18column (100 mm × 300 µm I.D.) delivered highly reproducible chromatograms with retention time and peak area relative standard deviations (RSDs) of <0.7% and <3.3% in isocratic mode (n = 10), as well as of <0.1% and