High‐voltage power supplies to capillary and microchip electrophoresis

Abstract

Over the past years, the development of capillary electrophoresis (CE) and microchip electrophoresis (ME) systems has grown due to instrumental simplicity and wide application. In both CE and ME, the application of a high voltage (HV) is a crucial step in the electrokinetic (EK) injection and separation processes. Particularly on ME devices, EK injection is often performed with three different modes: gated, pinched, and unpinched. In all these cases, different potential values may be applied to one or multiple channels to control the injection of small sample volumes as well as the separation process. For this reason, the construction of reliable HV power supplies (HVPS) is required. This review covers the advances of the development of commercial and laboratory-built HVPS for CE and ME. Moreover, it intends to be a guide for new developers of electrophoresis instrumentation.

In-house-made capillary electrophoresis instruments coupled with contactless conductivity detection as a simple and inexpensive solution for water analysis: a case study in Vietnam

“…These are available from different suppliers and have different feature sets. 54 For a partly automated system extra cost is incurred by valves and gas pressure regulators. No controlling program is needed and all operations, i.e.…”

High-efficiency ballistic electrostatic generator using microdroplets

“…The total power is conveniently scalable by increasing the pore number using MEMS (MicroElectroMechanical Systems) techniques 24 and if scaling holds up, 160 kW could be obtained on 1 m 2 footprint. Direct practical use could be in high-voltage microfluidics 25 . Ten thousand pores, for example, will increase the current to 50 mA and the load impedance to 10 MO, values suitable for microchip capillary electrophoresis.…”

Number of theoretical plates achievable by a toroidal capillary electrophoresis system

“…This electrokinetic strategy and others are discussed in the following sections. It must be noted that a great variety of high‐voltage power supply modules are currently available, some of them with electric current control and even polarity inversion . For simplicity, let us suppose that cations are being analyzed and that EOF is zero (the inner wall of the fused‐silica toroid is modified to suppress EOF).…”