Advantages

HPLC is a versatile technique offering a number of selective variants to resolve complex mixtures of environmental, biological and pharmaceutical samples. It is more a concept which has been employed to a variety of chromatographic techniques based on adsorption, partition using normal bonded and reversed phase, ion-exchange, size exclusion, etc. It has the advantage of the possibility of controlling solute retention and better selectivity by manipulating the stationary phase, mobile phase and other experimental conditions. Some of the advantages may be summarized as follows:

i) It is a very fast separation method with analysis time as small as less than a minute in some cases.

ii) HPLC is a useful separation method with high resolving power and a quantitative analysis method with low detection limits and high accuracy.

iii) It is especially useful for resolving optically active compounds though different types of columns with chiral stationary phase are used.

iv) The technique is applicable to small amount of samples where even trace amounts of solutes may be determined.

v) All kinds of solids soluble in suitable organic solvent and liquid samples can be analyzed though gases can not be anayzed.

vi) HPLC has much wider applicability in pharmaceutical and food processing industry including forensic and environmental samples compared to GC which has been found to be more useful in petroleum industry.

vii) HPLC is especially useful for continuous monitoring of the column effluent and thus it can be used for any on-line process where analytical procedures may be automated and data need not be handled manually.

viii) HPLC provides repetitive and reproducible analysis using the same column.

ix) HPLC is being widely used for the speciation of ionic and non-ionic species such as various organic and inorganic forms of arsenic.

x) It is more versatile than gas chromatography since it is not limited to volatile and thermally stable samples with wider choice of stationary and mobile phases.

xi) It is a non-destructive method which can be used for preparative and process scale separations.

xii) It can be used for the separation of closely related compounds as well as for the purification of compounds.