Chromatography is an important enabling analytical methodology that is used in various forms across the chemical and biochemical disciplines for a wide variety of applications, including pharmaceutical, food, environmental and biomedical analyses and studies. It is therefore important that it also be a significant component of undergraduate education in science, especially in chemistry and biochemistry.Because of time and cost limitations generally associated with high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), most universities with large enrollment laboratory courses have avoided this technique in favor of gas chromatography. Liquid chromatography, however, has significant pedagogical advantages over gas chromatography because students can be presented with physical and visual examples of liquid chromatographic separations and the absorbance spectroscopy utilized for HPLC detection in simple bench-top experiments.In this project, recent advancements in HPLC technology have been utilized to introduce hands-on exercises demonstrating separations of simple mixtures in the undergraduate laboratory. Columns with solid-core porous-shell packing materials have been employed to generate efficient separations of simple mixtures with analysis times of less than two minutes. This fast run time allows time for each student in introductory laboratories and in upper division analytical laboratories to get hands-on experience with the instruments and to analyze their own samples.An important advancement of this project is the implementation of liquid chromatography exercises in large enrollment laboratory courses like those taught at most intermediate or large universities. This is accomplished through early instruction using illustrative bench top exercises, through application of state of the art yet affordable separations instruments and technologies that allow fast separations, and through the use of multiple instruments available to each laboratory section.The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the NSF (DUE-1044365) for support of this project.

Application of recent developments in commercial HPLC technology to teach liquid chromatography in large-enrollment undergraduate laboratories

246th National Meeting (2013)

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