A criterion for evaluation of chromatographic separation efficiency based on chemometric data treatment: Peak-purity weighted resolution

In this paper, a novel resolution criterion for evaluating chromatographic peak-purity and separation efficiency of complicated mixtures is suggested. In contrast to most conventional criteria, which are defined on the chromatograms recorded by single response detectors, the proposed criterion, peak-purity weighted resolution (PPWR), evaluates the resolution by considering the number of co-eluted pure components, an information which can be easily extracted from two-dimensional chromatography–spectrometry data by chemometric methods, such as evolving factor analysis (EFA) and fixed-size moving window evolving factor analysis (FSMWEFA). As demonstrated by simulated and experimentally recorded data, PPWR can not only give an overall evaluation of separation quality, but also can provide reliable information for purity assessment of a limited number of interested components.