Repeatability and reproducibility of high-concentration data in reversed-phase liquid chromatography: III. Isotherm reproducibility on Kromasil C18

Single component equilibrium isotherms of six compounds (aniline, caffeine, ethylbenzene, phenol, propranolol, and theophylline) were determined by the inverse method on 10 Kromasil-C18 columns, using water–methanol solutions as the mobile phase. This method offers an economic and fast isotherm determination by means of the overloaded band profiles of the compounds. Five out of the ten columns used in this test come from the same batch whilst the other five columns represent five additional batches. Statistical evaluation was used to assess the reproducibility of the isotherm parameters. We found that the column-to-column reproducibility of the isotherm parameters is of the same magnitude as the batch-to-batch reproducibility (with the exception of one outlier column). In most of the cases, the reproducibilities of the saturation capacities and that of the retention factors are excellent, they are typically between 1.2 and 3%, and very often below 2%. Within the limits of the experimental precision, these results agree with those obtained earlier, using a conventional method of isotherm determination.