Evaluation of the performance of an annular-expansion system for preparative liquid chromatography

The authors investigated a preparative column system, the annular-expansion column. The performance of the column in terms of reduced plate heights and reproducibilities of k values yieldes satisfactory results, which were comparable with values obtained using anal. columns. Furthermore, the stationary phase used in this study could easily be reused a no. of times, maintaining the same k values and column performance when the authors used theor. plate heights to measure the column efficiency. When the authors used the \"true\" plate height to measure the efficiencies, the authors obsd. that these values decreased after a few repacking steps. The authors can probably attribute this decrease in performance to the crushing of packing material particles. Decreasing the compressing pressure of the annular-expansion column reduced this particle crushing. Inclusion, the annular-expansion system has proved to be a useful tool for packing good quality, homemade preparative HPLC columns. [on SciFinder (R)]