Liquid chromatography (LC) is a technique widely used to identify and quantify organic compounds in a complex mixture. Typical operations of high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) involve continuous use of harmful solvents. Replacing these harmful solvents with safer alternatives will provide significant environmental, health, and safety benefits. In this work, a systematic approach for searching safer solvent blends to replace acetonitrile for reversed-phase (RP) HPLC operations is presented. GreenScreen^® for Safer Chemicals was used as the first filter to down-select safer solvent candidates from thousands of chemicals based on their safety ratings. A list of LC operation parameters was then employed to determine final solvent candidates. Finally, Hansen Solubility Parameters in Practice (HSPiP) software was utilized to identify the most probable compositions of blends from these solvents for actual LC testing. It was found that a blend of 75% ethanol and 25% methyl acetate by volume provided the chromatograms with the best performance, which had similar response factors and column efficiency compared to acetonitrile when surrogate food additives, dyes, and water pollutants were tested, suggesting that this solvent blend is a potential safer alternative to replace acetonitrile for certain LC applications.

液相色谱 (LC) 是一种广泛用于鉴定和定量复杂混合物中有机化合物的技术。高效液相色谱 (HPLC) 的典型操作涉及持续使用有害溶剂。用更安全的替代品代替这些有害溶剂将提供显着的环境、健康和安全效益。在这项工作中，提出了一种系统方法，用于寻找更安全的溶剂混合物来替代反相 (RP) HPLC 操作中的乙腈。绿屏^®更安全的化学品被用作第一个过滤器，根据其安全评级从数千种化学品中筛选出更安全的候选溶剂。然后使用一系列 LC 操作参数来确定最终的候选溶剂。最后，汉森实践中的溶解度参数 (HSPiP) 软件用于从这些溶剂中确定最可能的混合物组成，以用于实际 LC 测试。结果表明，当测试替代食品添加剂、染料和水污染物时，75% 乙醇和 25% 乙酸甲酯的混合物提供了最佳性能的色谱图，与乙腈相比具有相似的响应因子和柱效，表明对于某些 LC 应用，这种溶剂混合物是一种潜在的更安全的替代乙腈的替代品。