Relationship between carbon number and peak width in gas chromatography

When the unadjusted width (wR) is divided into hold-up width (wM) and adjusted width (wR′), a linear relationship between the natural logarithm of the width factor (p′) and the carbon number (n) is demonstrated and can be described by: ln p′=a+bn where a and b are constants. The coefficients of variance (r2) for n-alkanes, fatty acid methyl esters and fatty alcohols are 0.9997, 0.9996 and 0.9998, respectively.