Abstract: Microcolumn liquid chromatography (μ-LC) has been received extensive attention in recent years because of several key advantages: the ability to work at very low flow rates, which leads to a significantly lower solvent consumption; the possibility to inject very low sample size; the enhanced detection performance with the use of concentration sensitive detection devices as a result of the strongly reduced chromatographic dilution during the separation process (mass sensitivity), the availability to hyphenate to mass spectrometry (MS), et al. A microcolumn liquid chromatographic system was set up. The chromatographic separations of some ordinary hydroxybenzenes and amines were performed with different mobile phases using the weak hydrophobic interaction of imidazolium functionalized silica stationary phase on a microcolumn (150 mm×0.25 mm). The results showed that the organic compounds could be well separated when a few organic solvents were added in the mobile phase, and some weak hydrophobic organic compounds such as phenols could be separated using only water as the mobile phase. For the advantages of microcolumn liquid chromatography, this experiment avoided or significantly reduced the use of organic solvents which contaminated the environment. This system provided a base for microcolumn liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (μ-LC-MS).

Key words: amines , hydroxybenzenes, imidazolium functionalized silica stationary phase, ionic liquids, microcolumn liquid chromatography (μ-LC)