Criteria For Selection Of Separation Methods:

Now we have some idea about a majority of separation methods. The advantages, applications and limitations of some of the important methods will be discussed in the different units of this course. It might be a little premature to create a comparison of the methods, particularly, while we do not have enough background of the different separation methods. However, the assessment of utility of a method is really a position based problem. To describe this point, one could cite in which the selection of a method will be determined by the physical state of mixture, its complexity, and amount of sample available, the speed needed and the level of purity desired. Over and above this, one important point that has to be kept in mind is that whether the method has to be used for analysis or synthesis/recovery/purification. If a method has to be used on an organizational scale, a few various considerations also get prominence. In a situation like this, it is a little difficult task to impart special importance to one or the other criteria. However, having known about the utility of the separation methods, we can talk about some of the general criteria for the selection of the separation methods. That are

• Selectivity,
• Detectability,
• Yield, speed and convenience,
• Capability for hyphenation, and
• Ease in scaling up and economics.

We will now shortly elaborate each one of them.