A New Method for Identifying and Estimating the Parameters of the Instrumental Spreading Function in Size Exclusion Chromatography-Application to Particle Size Analysis

Herein is reported a new method for identifying and estimating the instrumental spreading function in size exclusion chromatography. The method is based on the solution of the integral equation when the size distribution of the injected standards are known. A numerical method after Ishige et al. (1) to solve the integral equation for the corrected distribution is suitably modified to estimate instead the spreading function when the true and measured chromatograms are both known. The method is evaluated for synthesized chromatograms using the particle size distribution of Dow polystyrene latices. It is then applied to experimental chromatograms of the latices obtained by size exclusion chromatography. The resulting spreading functions were then analysed for variance, skewness and kurtosis.