Development of an automatic vacuum liquid chromatographic device and its application in the separation of the components from Schisandra chinensis(Turcz)Baill
In order to meet the needs of efficient purification of products from natural resources,this paper developed an automatic vacuum liquid chromatographic device( AUTO-VLC)and applied it to the component separation of petroleum ether extracts of Schisandra chinensis(Turcz)Baill. The device was comprised of a solvent system,a 10-position distribu-tion valve,a 3-position changes valve,dynamic axis compress chromatographic columns with three diameters,and a 10-position fraction valve. The programmable logic controller( PLC)S7-200 was adopted to realize the automatic control and monitoring of the mobile phase changing, column selection,separation time setting and fraction collection. The separation results showed that six fractions( S1-S6)of different chemical components from 100 g Schisandra chinensis ( Turcz)Baill. petroleum ether phase were obtained by the AUTO-VLC with 150 mm diameter dynamic axis compress chromatographic column. A new method used for the VLC separation parameters screened by using multiple development TLC was developed and confirmed. The ini-tial mobile phase of AUTO-VLC was selected by taking R f of all the target compounds ranging from 0 to 0.45 for fist development on the TLC;gradient elution ratio was selected according to k value(the slope of the linear function of Rf value and development times on the TLC)and the resolution of target compounds;elution times( n)were calculated by the formula n≈ΔR f/k. A total of four compounds with the purity more than 85% and 13 other components were separa-ted from S5 under the selected conditions for only 17 h. Therefore,the development of the au-tomatic VLC and its method are significant to the automatic and systematic separation of tradi-tional Chinese medicines.