A high-throughput three-capillary noise-cancelling viscometer for chromatographic systems

This paper describes an analytical three-capillary viscometer detector that eliminates the traditional viscometer "hold-up" volume (commonly found in four-capillary designs) while maintaining cancellation of short-term pump noise and long-term baseline drift of temperature and solvent flow rate that are inherent in chromatography systems. This improvement allows a staggered sample injection approach in chromatography, yielding a significant increase in sample throughput by cutting down the chromatographic run time. It also provides a more robust design as it does not require capillary rebalancing, complex purging, flushing or changing the hold-up volume to accommodate long-term chromatographic use.