High Performance Liquid Chromatography Separations Using Short Columns Packed with Spherical and Irregular Shaped ODS Particles

Abstract

In a comparative study of the separation of a mixture of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbrons on 5 cm and 10 cm columns packed with 3μ and 5μ ODS spherical particles, the separations achieved on the 10 cm column were not significantly better than those on the 5 cm column. Although, columns packed with 3μ ODS spherical particles gave slightly better resolution than those packed with 5μ ODS spherical particles having the same physical properties, differences were observed when columns packed with ODS spherical particles were compared with columns packed with ODS irregular shaped particles of the same size.

The results show that separations on a 5μ or 3μ packed columns takes place at the first few centimeters.