The Direct Determination of Axial Dispersion in Size Exclusion Chromatography Based on Poissonian Chain Length Distributions

Summary A fast and straightforward method for the direct determination of _ad the extent of axial dispersion under normal working conditions is presented. The method makes use of the peak variance of Poisson distributions, which can be determined from the points of inflection. The applicability of this method is experimentally demonstrated for four series of commercially available polymer standards. Theoretical calculations and experimental results are presented that confirm that this method also works with narrow distributions which are the weighted sum of several adjacent Poisson distributions.Presented at: International Symposium on Separation and Characterization of Natural and Synthetic Macromolecules, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, February 5–7, 2003