HPLC

HPLC:

High-performance liquid chromatography or high-pressure liquid chromatography as it is sometimes referred to, is most commonly called HPLC. This highly versatile chromatographic technique has applications across many industries and is one of our specialties at Analytical Instrument Resource.

Analytical Instrument Resource buys and sells High-performance Liquid Chromatographs (HPLC) products from a variety of manufactures Hewlett Packard or Agilent Technologies, Shimadzu and Thermo Scientific. The majority of our HPLC systems are the Agilent Technologies 1100 and 1200 series.

High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) is used in a wide variety of industries. Some of the most common are pharmaceutical, drug, environmental, food, and forensic laboratories.

HPLC is an analytical technique typically used to analyze UV/Visible and Fluorescence absorbing organic compounds. This analysis is performed by pumping solvents at very high pressure through a column with a particle bed of a specific pore size which is coated with an organic phase that attracts different compounds according to polarity, size, or both. In most cases compounds are removed from the column bed by an increasing polar solvent concentration. Each compound elutes from the column by its specific compound attributes such as polarity and size. Each organic compound exits the column at a specific time (retention time). As it elutes a detector measures its absorbance at a specific wavelength. The response is recorded and compared to a known concentration. This allows the user to determine how much of a specific compound is in each sample.

One of the major advantages of HPLC is its ability to analyze heat labile compounds that cannot be done by Gas Chromatography or Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry. Also, HPLC is very sensitive and can achieve very low detection limits. HPLC can also measure compounds in the high percent range. This makes it very versatile in many industries.

HPLC/MS/MS:

HPLC/MS/MS or High-Performance Liquid Chromatography – Tandem Mass Spectrometry is a technique that is utilized for low level detection of the various compounds. When an HPLC system is coupled to the mass spectrometer separation of many components in one sample injection is possible. The mass spectrometer has a front-end source that allows the HPLC and mass spectrometer to be coupled; without the source this technique would not be possible. There are three types of mass spectrometer source assemblies: electrospray ionization (ESI), atmospheric pressure chemical ionization (APCI), atmospheric pressure photo ionization (APPI) with the most common being ESI and APCI. The flow from the HPLC is moved to the mass spectrometer source via small tubing that creates high pressure, when introduced into the source it is vaporized using high temperature, gas flow, and an electric charge. Once in the source the sample is pushed into the mass spectrometer detector via gas flow, the mass spectrometer separates and quantifies the ions based on their mass to charge ratio.

HPLC/MS/MS instruments are used in a variety of fields including, pharmaceutical, forensics, environmental, food, and drug.

Analytical Instrument Resource buys and sells HPLC/MS/MS systems from a variety of manufactures including Sciex, Agilent, and Thermo.

The list of products in this category is of common systems that we produce and support on a routine basis and are meant to be examples of systems that we can build from our typical inventory.