Numerical determination of the competitive isotherm of enantiomers

A numerical method was developed and used to determine adsorption isotherms in chromatography. The numerical parameters of an isotherm model were derived from the recorded band profiles of the racemic mixture of the 1-phenyl-1-propanol enantiomers, by means of a nonlinear least-squares method. We used the equilibrium-dispersive model of chromatography with several isotherm models. The numerical constants of the isotherm models were tuned so that the calculated and the measured band profiles match as much as possible. We show that this numerical inverse method can be applied even without the knowledge of the individual band profile of the pure enantiomers. The isotherms determined from the—usually unresolved—overloaded band profiles matched extremely well the isotherms determined by frontal analysis. Several isotherm models were used and tested—such as Langmuir, biLangmuir, Tóth, Langmuir–Freundlich. The best-fit isotherm was selected by means of statistical evaluation of the results.