Waters ACQUITY UPC2 System Wins Green Innovation Prize
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On June 6, Waters Corporation’s ACQUITY UPC2™ System was awarded a Green Innovation Award at Forum LABO and BIOTECH 2013, France’s premier laboratory science trade show and exhibition.
The ACQUITY UPC2 System, substitutes mainly carbon dioxide for organic solvents for chromatographic separations and excels at applications as varied as fat soluble vitamins, lipids, organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), and chiral compound analysis.
Laboratory-dependent organizations often consume large amounts of organic solvents that are expensive to purchase and can be twice as expensive to dispose of.
Many of these organizations have set aggressive sustainability goals for themselves and are investigating the potential of Waters® UPC2 Technology to help meet them and, in turn, save hundreds of thousands of dollars over time.
Normal phase LC is one solvent-hungry technique that the ACQUITY® UPC2 system seeks to replace.
For these reasons, interest in the technology is especially intense among firms with large laboratory operations. In a videotaped interview, Daniel Zimmerli, a senior scientist in the Pharmaceuticals Division at J. Hoffman-LaRoche (Basel, Switzerland) talked about the potential of UPC2 Technology to cut solvent usage and, in his estimation, replace normal phase LC in “3 to 5 years”.
Technological innovation, and the growth of corporation sustainability initiatives, have played a significant role in the renewed interest in SFC and convergence chromatography.
A recent article on UPC2 in the June 1 issue of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News reports that the carbon footprint for manufacturing acetonitrile is substantial.
With acetonitrile, a common LC solvent, costing between $300 - $400/four-liter bottle - and more than twice that to dispose of - organizations are taking a second look at their consumption of organic solvents in the laboratory.
CO2 on the other hand is extracted from the atmosphere and vented to it after use. As the article states, CO2 is the “greenest HPLC solvent, hands down.”
UPC2 Technology is based on the principles of UltraPerformance Convergence Chromatography™ which employs compressed CO2 as the primary mobile phase constituent.
The instrument is based on the robust, reliable low-dispersion design of the Waters ACQUITY UPLC® platform perfected for use with sub-two-micron particle technology.
As an orthogonal technique to LC and GC, ACQUITY UPC2 System is finding many applications within the pharmaceutical and life sciences, chemical materials, environmental and food and beverage industries.
The technique is suitable for a diverse range of compounds including most organic-soluble compounds, most salts of organic acids and bases, small lipophilic peptides and non-polar solutes.
It is ideal for structurally similar compounds including chiral entities, diastereomers, enantiomers, positional isomers and structural analogs.
Essentially any compound soluble in an organic solvent is a candidate for convergence chromatography. The technique is also compatible with a most popular detection modes including mass spectrometry.
