A Novel Quality Criteria for Optimization of Chromatographic Multicomponent Separations

Abstract

This study presents a Chromatographic Optimization Function (COF) to optimize chromatographic separation conditions. The COF proposed herein provides several advantages over conventional COFs, including the ability to eliminate the ambiguous selection of the weighting factors and easily obtain the acceptable or maximum resolution in the shortest separation time. The parameters used to construct this COF are in the form of sigmoidal functions to reduce the weight of the response for less acceptable conditions and to filter out undesired situations. In addition, resolution between peaks, length of separation time, and number of peaks separated are used as parameters for constructing the proposed COF. Closely examining the performance of the COF for both simulated and experimental chromatographic separations reveals an adequate correlation with human judgment and, also, creates no problems in selecting weighting factors.