Separation technique:

Thus, on coming into contact with the sites occupied by the most strongly adsorbed component, it will displace this component into the mobile phase and therefore, move onto the next group of sites occupied by the next component which will then itself be displaced. Thus, the displacer drives the adsorbed components progressively along a column, every elements displacing the one in front, until they   are eluted in the similar order in that they were adsorbed on the column. The least strongly held being eluted first. The concentration profile of displacement development is shown. Displacement development has very limited applications as a separation technique and is only very rarely used in quantitative analysis.