Preparative high pressure liquid chromatography (Prep-HPLC)
The preparative-HPLC is particularly well adapted for the isolation and purification of valuable chemicals and their breakdown products. The instrument has a gradient pump and an UV detector covering a large domain of wavelengths, allowing to obtain pure compounds in amounts ranging from one to a few milligrams used for identification and structure elucidation of unknowns. Also, the relative high flow rates of prep-HPLC pump (up to 200 mL/min) can be used to obtain higher amounts (hundreds of milligrams) for standards, reference compounds and compounds for toxicological and pharmacological testing. By using the differential refractive index detector and suitable columns the system becomes a preparative GPC, allowing to separate the oligomer fraction (with molecular mass lower than 1000 or 5000 Da).