Emerging approaches to estimate retention factors in high performance liquid chromatography

The retention factor is one of the most universally used parameters in chromatography. The errors associated with the conventional ways to determine the retention factor of compounds in liquid chromatography are studied and compared with those corresponding to new approaches. The later avoid the use of extra-column time and hold-up time values, which have proven to be tedious and ambiguous. Simulations and real data, used to examine the accuracy of four different approaches (two classic and two new), suggest that the new approaches could be considered more satisfactory than the classic ones.