Simple Solutions: Sky™ Inlet Liners
Inert Sky™ Inlet Liners Improve Accuracy and Precision for a Wide Range of Analytes

Many chromatographic problems, such as poor response and missing or tailing peaks are caused by activity in the inlet liner. These effects complicate quantification and can be particularly problematic for sensitive analytes. New Sky™ inlet liners from Restek offer exceptional inertness, assuring enhanced transfer of analytes to the column, good response, and highly symmetric peaks. The inertness of these liners is due to a state-of-the art deactivation process that completely passivates the liner and wool so that they are inert to a wide variety of reactive analytes.

Some deactivations, such as base deactivation, are effective only for particular target compound chemistries. In contrast, the balanced deactivation of Sky™ liners prevents interactions with many chemical classes. As shown below, complex pesticide probes, as well as both acidic and basic compounds have strong responses and excellent peak shapes, demonstrating the inertness of Sky™ liners. With new Sky™ inlet liners you will see improved sensitivity, accuracy, and reproducibility liner-to-liner, which allows you to quantify challenging compounds at trace levels with confidence.

Reduced Breakdown Improves Trace Analyses
Endrin & DDT are important analytes for the environmental and food safety industries, and also serve as excellent general probes for liner inertness. Both compounds are sensitive to different modes of activity due to their chemical structures and because they are analyzed at very low concentrations (typically parts-per-billion concentrations for ECD analyses). As shown in Figure 1, Sky™ liners are significantly more inert than comparable liners from Agilent, showing 3-4 times less endrin and DDT breakdown.

Greater Inertness Results in Higher Analyte Response
Another common probe used to illustrate inertness is 2,4-dinitrophenol (2,4-DNP), which functions as an indicator of acid compound interactions. It is used to monitor system suitability in semivolatiles methods, which benefit from the use of wool to assist in sample vaporization. As shown in Figure 2, the response of 2,4- DNP with the Sky™ inlet liner, even at low concentrations, is superior to a competitor's liner. The Agilent liner with wool has active sites that adsorb 2,4-DNP and reduce its response. In contrast an excellent response is achieved using the Sky™ liner, even in the presence of wool.

Comprehensive Deactivation Assures Excellent Peak Shape
In addition to providing excellent results for reactive pesticides and acidic compounds, Sky™ inlet liners are also highly inert to active basic compounds, such as underivatized amphetamines. The exceptional inertness of Sky™ liners produces much better peak shape than is typically seen on other liners, resulting in simpler quantification and more accurate results