ANALYSIS OF FULLERENES BY REVERSED-PHASE HIGHPERFORMANCE LIQUID-CHROMATOGRAPHY

Chromatographic separation of fullerenes was achieved with a conventional reversed-phase analytical system. A tetrahydrofuran-acetonitrile mobile phase (60:40) (1.0 ml/min) used with a 25 cm ODS column separates C-60 and C-70 with a resolution of 6.4 and an analysis time of 11.4 min. This method is convenient and offers sufficient resolving power to be applied to the analysis of a variety of fullerenes and fullerene reaction product mixtures. The mobile phase allows use of the sensitive ultraviolet absorbance bands of fullerenes in detection. The method is compared with other reversed-phase methods for analysis of fullerene mixtures.