Analysis of vegetable and fish oils by capillary supercritical fluid chromatography with flame ionization detection

Capillary SFC with supercritical CO₂ as mobile phase and flame ionization detection was adopted to separate and determine triacylglycerols in vegetable and fish oils. The effect on separation of many experimental variables has been checked along with the selectivity of several stationary phases of different polarity. A standard mixture of 13 triacylglycerols was used to optimize the procedure and their retention times were used as reference to identify peaks in real samples. In spite of the fact that many peaks remained unidentified, the chromatograms obtained were useful as fingerprint analyses of the real samples examined.