High-performance liquid chromatography column efficiency

An efficient packed gas chromatography column will have several thousand theoretical plates, and capillary columns will have in excess of 10,000 theoretical plates. The H value for a 1-m column with 10,000 theoretical plates would be 100 cm/ 10,000 plates = 0.01 cm/plate. In a high-performance liquid chromatography (below), efficiency on the order of 400 theoretical plates per centimeter is typically achieved, and colunms are 10 to 50 cm in length. 

Ishizuka, N., Kobayashi, H., Minakuchi, H., Nakanishi, K., Hirao, K., Hosoya, K., Ikegami, T., Tanaka, N. (2002). Monolithic silica columns for high-efficiency separations by high-performance liquid chromatography. J. Chromatogr. A 960, 85-96. 

Nimura, N., Itoh, H., Kinoshita, T., Nagae, N., Nomura, M. (1991). Fast protein separation by reversed-phase high-performance liquid-chromatography on octadecylsilyl-bonded non-porous silica-gel — effect of particle-size of column packing on column efficiency. J. Chromatogr. 585(2), 207-211. 

Modern high-performance liquid chromatography has been developed to a very high level of performance by the introduction of selective stationary phases of small particle sizes, resulting in efficient columns with large plate numbers per litre. 

Particulate sorbents are available almost exclusively in the shape of micrometersized beads. These beads are packed in columns and represent currently the most common stationary phases for high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Despite their immense popularity, slow diffusional mass transfer of macromolecular solutes into the stagnant pool of the mobile phase present in the pores of the separation medium and the large void volume between the packed particles are considered to be major problems in the HPLC of macromolecules, frequently impairing their rapid and efficient separation [1]. 

K. Jones, Process scale high-performance liquid chromatography. Part I An optimisation procedure to maximise column efficiency, Chromatographia, 25 (1988), 437-442. 

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