Porous Polymeric Substrates Based on a Styrene–Divinylbenzene Copolymer for Reversed-Phase and Ion Chromatography

This review is devoted to the most hydrolytically stable and widely used polymeric substrates based on a styrene–divinylbenzene copolymer (PS–DVB) which can be used as stationary phases (e.g., in reversed-phase chromatography (RP HPLC)) without modification and can be subjected to multistage surface functionalization to increase the selectivity and efficiency of the final sorbents (e.g., in ion chromatography (IC)). The first chapters of the review consider various production methods of PS–DVB substrates, their main structural physicochemical characteristics, as well as various methods of analysis of the surface and porous structure and their comparison between each other. There are quite a few reviews on the synthesis and properties of polymer materials in the published sources; however, there are almost no data on the interrelation of the physicochemical characteristics of the substrates and chromatographic properties of stationary phases in HPLC. Because of this, the main aim of this review is to find the regularities of the effect of the structural parameters of PS–DVB (particle size, specific surface area, pore size) on the chromatographic properties of sorbents in HPLC.