Excerpt from the Brief History of the Development of Chromatographic Analysis and Its Inspiration to Us (Liu Huwei, Fu Ruonang)（1）

In the development process of chromatography over 100 years, the development of various methods has been uneven. Although LC appeared early, GC was the earliest and most widely used technology in industrial production. The reason for this is that GC has high analytical sensitivity, separation efficiency, analysis speed, and analysis accuracy, which well met the needs of scientific research and social development at that time. Later, HPLC made rapid progress, which was a technological breakthrough based on small particle fillers and high-pressure infusion pumps, it is also due to the development of the pharmaceutical industry and life sciences. Currently, GC and HPLC are the most widely used analytical techniques in the world, playing extremely important roles in fields such as food safety, petrochemicals, biopharmaceuticals, environmental protection, and materials science. The future development trend is the automation and networking of instruments, especially the application of computer technology and artificial intelligence, as well as the integration of specialized injection devices and sample pretreatment devices with chromatographic instruments. For example, headspace injection, blow trap injection, solid-phase microextraction (SPME), supercritical fluid extraction (SFE), and pressurized solvent extraction (PSE) have achieved online integration with different chromatographic instruments. The rapid popularization of GC-MS, along with the remarkable development of full two-dimensional GC, multidimensional LC, and two-dimensional CE, will play an important role in the analysis of complex mixtures. The application of HPLC in the field of life sciences has developed rapidly in recent years, among which the more active are ion chromatography (IC), hydrophobic interaction chromatography (HIC), chiral separation, and multidimensional chromatography combining reverse phase chromatography with other modes. HPLC has a wide range of applications and can be used for preparation and separation, with great potential in the fields of life sciences and medicineHPLC. The instrument market for HPLC will continue to grow, mainly manifested in the further maturity and expansion of application scope of LC MS systems and LC NMR systems, and develop simpler and more efficient instrument systems, including various new MS technologies. According to the latest research report from China Industry Research Report Network, the total size of the global chromatographic instrument market is expected to reach 10.99 billion US dollars by 2022.

Famous chromatographic scholar G.Guiochon published an article in 1998 stating that GC and HPLC are highly successful examples in the field of separation and analysis, SFC and FFF are developing slowly, while CE is in an uncertain state of future. Giddings and Myers published pioneering research on SFC as early as the 1960s, In the early 1980s, capillary column SFC was a research hotspot, And at that time, it was believed that SFC would revolutionize analytical methods, but later major instrument companies stopped producing SFC and abandoned plans to further develop SFC. Undoubtedly, SFC has some unique applications that combine the advantages of GC and LC, but it can only survive in the gap between GC and HPLC, which have become widely used technologies, resulting in a limited SFC market. It is worth noting that in recent years, SFC has shown a resurgence, especially in the fields of chiral drug separation, life analysis chemistry, and omics analysis, the multi sample applicability, rapid separation, and environmentally friendly characteristics of mobile phase of SFC are gradually being valued by people. There is an increasing number of literature on SFC filled columns using compressed CO2 mobile phase and sub 2μm fillers. SFC and UHPLC separation can be achieved on one instrument, which is referred to as ultra-high performance phase chromatography by Watsch Company(ultra performance convergence chromatography, UPC2);The two-dimensional separation system composed of SFC and HPLC exhibits superior analysis speed and separation efficiency compared to general two-dimensional HPLC, and is expected to be applied in more research fields. So, several major instrument manufacturers, such as Agilent, Watsch, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Shimadzu, have also launched their own SFC instruments, indicating that this technology may have good market prospects.