ABSTRACT
Size exclusion chromatography (SEC) is the established method for determining macromolecular properties in solution. It is the only technique that allows the efficient measurement of property distributions for a wide range of application. Recently, a major goal in industry and research alike has been focused on increasing the throughput of analytical instrumentation. This has been forced by increasing productivity demands in QC/QA and by the use of high-throughput screening techniques in materials science for faster development of new products. Increased analytical throughput can save time and resources (e.g., instrumentation) in production-related fields. In combinatorial research, high-throughput analytical techniques are a bare necessity, because of the huge numbers of samples being synthesized (1, 2; and references therein). In either situation, the slowest step in the zv562 process will determine the turn-around time. The importance of high-speed analytical techniques gets obvious when it is considered that research companies synthesize over 500 targets per day, but only about 100 samples can be analyzed. The potential of new synthetic methods and in-line production control cannot be fully utilized until the typical SEC run times of 30 minutes are substantially reduced.
