Separations of petroleum products involving supercritical fluid chromatography

This paper gives a survey of the most attractive trends and applications of supercritical fluid chromatography in the petroleum industry: simulated distillation, group-type analysis and related applications including the implementation of multidetection in a so-called "hypernated" system, as well as the hyphenation to GC x GC for improved group-type separation, SFC x GC and first promising SFCxSFC results. Some specific technical information related to the use of capillary columns or conventional packed columns in combination with FID (or detectors that require decompression and in some instances splitting of the mobile phase prior detection) is also provided. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.