But Why Doesn’t It Get Better? Kinetic Plots for Liquid Chromatography, Part III: Pulling It All Together

Choosing a liquid chromatography (LC) column for a particular application can be a surprisingly challenging task. On one hand, column manufacturers give us many options to choose from, including particle types, pore sizes, particle sizes, and different lengths and diameters. On the other hand, we usually don’t have time to experimentally evaluate many combinations of these parameters, and sometimes we end up picking something similar to the columns that are already in the drawer. 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 and length) will perform in terms of the time needed to get to a particular column efficiency (and thus resolution), and therefore make well-informed decisions when choosing columns.