Prediction of elution bandwidth for purine compounds by a retention model in reversed-phase HPLC with linear-gradient elution

In reversed-phase liquid chromatography, the retention mechanism of solute has been studied under linearly programmed gradient mobile-phase conditions. The separation of a mixture of four purine compounds (purine, theobromine, theophylline, and caffeine) was considered as a practical case in two binary mobile phase systems, water/methanol and water/acetonitrile. The retention model which describes how the retention factor is related to the mobile-phase composition has been developed in various mathematical forms to predict the retention time in both linear and gradient elutions. For a pulse injection of sample, two important factors, the retention time and the bandwidth of solute, might be computable to predict the elution profiles estimated by the distribution function, such as the Gaussian distribution function. In this work, a prediction method based on the analogue of the retention model was proposed to calculate the bandwidth in linear gradient elutions. Band broadening was caused by the different migration velocities of the front and rear ends of the solute band in a chromatographic column. Therefore, the migration behaviors of the front and rear ends of the solute band were explained with the same retention model which had been used to predict the retention time of solute. For the well retained solutes, theophylline and caffeine, the predicted bandwidth and experimentally obtained bandwidth showed good agreement in both isocratic and gradient elutions.