But Why Doesn’t It Get Better? Kinetic Plots for Liquid Chromatography, Part II: Making and Interpreting the Plots

Choosing a liquid chromatography (LC) column for a particular application can be a surprisingly challenging task. On the one hand, column manufacturers provide us many options to choose from, including particle types, pore sizes, particle sizes, and different lengths and diameters. On the other hand, we usually do not have time to experimentally evaluate many combinations of these parameters, and sometimes we end up picking something similar to the columns that are already available. The “kinetic plot” is a powerful graphical tool that can help leverage the best available theory to help us understand how different combinations of parameters (that is, particle size, length, among others) will perform in regard to the time needed to get to a particular column efficiency (and thus resolution), and therefore make well-informed decisions when choosing columns.