Manufacturers and Equipment Selection

Major manufacturers of HPLC instruments include Waters, Agilent (formerly Hewlett Packard), and Shimadzu, PerkinElmer, Thermo, Beckman, Varian, Hitachi, Jasco, Dionex, Gilson, Scientific Systems (SSI), and Isco. The Internet addresses of these companies can be found in the reference section. HPLC is a mature technology and most manufacturers have highly reliable products with sufficient performance and feature sets to be competitive in the market place. However, there can still be significant differences between the vendors on these performance characteristics on systems (dwell volume, dispersion), pumps (low flow, seal life), autosamplers (carryover, speed, sample capacity, minimum sample volume), and detectors (sensitivity, gradient baseline shift). 

Equipment selection is often based on performance specifications, pricing, features, or vendor s technical or service support. Major companies tend to purchase HPLC from one or two vendors to reduce cost in system qualification, equipment service, and operator training. The compatibility to an existing chromatographic data-handling network often dominates the purchase decision for HPLC equipment. 

This chapter provides an overview of modern HPLC equipment, including the operating principles and trends of pumps, injectors, detectors, data systems, and specialized applications systems. System dwell volume and instrumental bandwidth are discussed, with their impacts on shorter and smaller diameter column applications. The most important performance characteristics are flow precision and compositional accuracy for the pump, sampling precision and carryover for the autosampler, and sensitivity for the detector. Manufacturers and selection criteria for HPLC equipment are reviewed. 

Holler, and T.A. Nieman, Principles of Instrumental Analysis, 5th Edition, Harcourt College Publishers, Fort Worth, TX, 1997. 

Ahuja and M.W. Dong, eds., Handbook of Pharmaceutical Analysis by HPLC, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2005, Chapter 4. 

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