Unbiased Determination of Adsorption Isotherms by Inverse Method in Liquid Chromatography

The Inverse Method is a widely used technique for the determination of adsorption isotherms in liquid chromatography. In this method, isotherm is determined from the overloaded peak profile of the component by the iterative solution of the mass balance equation of liquid chromatography. Successful use of this method requires a prior assumption of equation of isotherm (Langmuir, BET etc.). In this work, we have developed an inverse method that gives results of similar accuracy to the frontal analysis without assuming the equation of the isotherm. The oversaturated peaks were calculated using a spline fitted to data points instead of the derivative of the isotherm. The distribution of the isotherm points were optimized for minimizing the difference between the measured and calculated overloaded peaks. The accuracy of the developed method was verified with synthetic benchmark peaks and by the determination of isotherm of buthyl-benzoate under real conditions. The results confirmed that the accuracy of the developed method is similar to that of Frontal Analysis.