ABSTRACT
Gas chromatography (GC) has developed over the past 25 years or so into one of the most extensively used on-line analytical techniques in industrial process control and optimization. Liquid chromatography (LC), and its several individual techniques, is firmly established in the laboratory, but its on-line process use has not developed as rapidly as GC. Nevertheless, substantial growth in on-line process LC is predicted for the next few years. The techniques of high-performance LC (normal-phase and reversed-phase), ion-exchange chromatography, and size-exclusion chromatography have great potential in industry as on-line analytical techniques, including the new field of biotechnology. Computer-based, multistream, multicomponent systems should find extensive use in pilot-plant investigations, where their ability to gather large amounts of data (on-line rather than by laboratory testing) could have important implications.
