Comparison of the capability of peak functions in describing real chromatographic peaks

This paper describes the results of a comparison of four peak functions in describing real chromatographic peaks. They are the empirically transformed Gaussian, polynomial modified Gaussian, generalized exponentially modified Gaussian and hybrid function of Gaussian and truncated exponential functions. Real chromatographic peaks of different shapes (fronting, symmetric, and tailing) are obtained by various separation conditions of reversed-phase liquid chromatography. They are then fitted to the peak functions via the Marquardt–Levenberg algorithm, a nonlinear least-squares curve-fitting procedure, by Microsoft Solver. The qualities of the fits are evaluated by the sum of the squares of the residuals. It is concluded in the study that the empirically transformed Gaussian function offers the highest flexibility (best fits) to all shapes of chromatographic peaks, including extremely asymmetric tailing peaks with a peak asymmetry of up to 8. The flexibility of this function should improve our ability to process chromatographic peaks such as deconvolution of overlapped peaks and smoothing noisy peaks for the determination of statistical moments.