Chromatographic peak shape from a stochastic-diffusive model with multiple retention mechanisms: Analytic time-domain...

A time-domain analytic expression for chromatographic peak shapes is derived within a stochastic-diffusive framework that incorporates axial diffusion (molecular and multipath/eddy), finite initial spatial variance, a retention mechanism characterized by a high rate of short-duration events, and an arbitrary number of independent slow retention mechanisms, each characterized by its own rate of infrequent, long-duration events. A highly efficient evaluation scheme is derived for this expression. In the single-slow-mechanism case, it is two to four orders of magnitude faster than the previously available analytic route. Analytical derivatives with respect to all model parameters are also obtained, and each can be evaluated at computational cost comparable to that of the peak-shape expression. Illustrative fits to three literature peaks yielded full-profile RMSE values lower than those obtained with the exponentially modified Gaussian (EMG), a well-established phenomenological peak-shape function included only to place the residual magnitudes in context, with minima ranging from 0.03 to 0.14 percent of peak height, compared with 0.43 to 5.57 percent for the EMG. Relative to the one-slow-mechanism formulation, allowing more than one slow mechanism produced a data-dependent improvement that exceeded one order of magnitude for one of the peaks.