Investigations on the resolution of overlapped chromatograms

Abstract

High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and Gas Chromatography (GC) are generally used for complex chemical analysis. Some components in the chemicals produce overlapping chromatograms due to their similar retention time (RT) and hence difficult to analyze. Many of the curve fitting deconvolution methods used so far required many peak parameters as an input to get accurate deconvolution. They were time consuming and required human intervention. The multivariate curve resolution techniques developed so far were not accurate for the separation of severely overlapped chromatograms. Even if the peaks were moderately overlapped, some of the already developed algorithms failed to resolve. The Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) based separation algorithms did not give unique results. The convergence issues of the NMF algorithms were also questionable.