Separation of Hydrocarbon Mixtures in the Microgram Range by Inclusion in a Urea-packed Mini Column

The use of classical urea inclusion techniques for the separation of straight chain hydrocarbons from branched and cyclic compounds is satisfactory when applied to mixtures in the milligram to gram ranges, but leads to low separation efficiencies when quantities in the microgram to milligram range are involved. In this study, a modified inclusion technique using an urea-packed milli-bore column and a catalytic eluent is described. Examples of its use for the separation of mixtures of linear and cyclic hydrocarbons from 30μg up to a few milligrams are given. The versatility of this technique for the analyses of low amounts of environmental samples is described, and an application to the hydrocarbon fraction of surface sediment from lake Leman (Switzerland) is presented.