Monitoring of randomly varying chemical processes by correlation chromatography

Correlation chromatography (CC) is a well known method for reducing detection limits in chromatographic analysis. Its usefulness for the monitoring of varying substance flows is however more ambiguous. Although generally believed as a useful tool for this purpose, very little work has been done to prove it. In this paper CC and common, single injection chromatography (SIC) were compared with respect to their restoration capabilities of a stochastic first order process, which is assumed to be the varying concentration input function of a chromatograph. It is demonstrated that CC can restore the input function with a smaller error than SIC when the process rate and input sequence length are related by a certain condition. The effect was found to be more profound when measurement noise is present due to the multiplex advantage of the CC method. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.