A new laboratory system has been developed for rapid electrophoretic separations and determinations of inorganic and organic ions. The instrument employs short quartz capillary with a total length of 10 cm and effective lengths of 4 cm.
It has been applied to separations of neutral mono-and disaccharides, in combination with contactless conductivity detection. The saccharides are separated in the anionic form, in solutions of alkali hydroxides, namely, KOH, NaOH and LiOH.
The separation of a model mixture of five saccharides (sucrose, lactose, glucose, fructose and ribose) takes less than one minute, the detection limits equaling 15 and 35 mg L-1 for sucrose and lactose, respectively. The technique developed has been used to determine sucrose, glucose and fructose in high-energy drinks.