ABSTRACT
Chromatography was almost exclusively used for preparative purposes. However, with the advent of linear detectors that span a wide solute concentration range, the situation has changed and gas chromatography (GC) and liquid chromatography (LC) are mainly utilized for quantitative analysis. A chromatogram can be evaluated for quantitative analysis in one of two ways, by the measurement of either peak areas or peak heights. The area of a peak is the integration of the mass per unit volume of solute eluted from the column with respect to time. Essentially, there are two procedures used in GC and LC for quantitative analysis. They are: the first employs a reference standard to which the peak areas or peak heights of the other solutes in the sample are compared; the second is a normalization procedure where the area (height) of any one peak is expressed as a percentage of the total area (heights) of all the peaks.
