Instrumental Broadening Correction in Size Exclusion Chromatography through Fast Fourier Transform Techniques

Abstract

This paper shows the practicability of the use of the fast Fourier transform (FFT), with appropriate filtering in the frequency domain, as a means of deconvoluting Tung's integral formula (1). The method is limited to uniform instrumental spreading functions, but presents several important advantages: it is numerically efficient, no assumptions about the shape of the spreading function are made, it eliminates the highfrequency measurement noise components from the corrected chromatogram without modifying the original data, and provides a means of physically interpreting the results.