ABSTRACT
High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is an instrumental chromatography method in which the mobile phase is a liquid. Simply stated, HPLC involves the high pressure flow of a liquid mobile phase through a metal tube (column) containing the stationary phase, with electronic detection of mixture components occurring on the effluent end. The basic HPLC system consists of a solvent (mobile phase) reservoir, pump, injection device, column, and detector. At the head of the column is the injection device which introduces the sample to the system. Besides these basic components, an HPLC unit may be equipped with a gradient programmer, an auto sampler, a “guard column” and various in-line filters, and a computing integrator or other data handling system. The function of the HPLC detector is of course to examine the solution that elutes from the column and output an electronic signal proportional to the concentrations of individual components present there.
