Chromatography

Chromatography is the most widely used technique of separation in chemical laboratories where it is used for analysis, isolation and purification and is commonly used as a component of small and large-scale production in the chemical process industry. In terms of scale, quantities of less than one nanogram are separated and identified during analysis at one extreme minute, while hundreds of kilograms of material per hour are processed into refined products at the other. In its many variants, the versatility of chromatography is behind its omnipresent status in separation science, coupled with simplicity of approach and a reasonably well-developed framework in which the different chromatographic techniques operate.