Optimising reversed phase separations with the aid of a spreadsheet

A separation of eight compounds by reversed phase HPLC, in methanol and water mixtures, was optimised with the aid of a spreadsheet. The eight compounds had large differences in polarity and some peaks exhibited crossover as solvent strength changed. Currently available linear gradient theor was used but all calculation sand generation of chromatograms was done with a commonly used spreadsheet. Optimisation of resolution can be done visually from the chromatograms produced by the spreadsheet or semi automatically by using functions available in the spreadsheet. Using a small initial number of gradient runs it was possible to optimise isocratic, single segment, or dual segment linear gradient separations.