High-performance liquid chromatography(HPLC)is an instrumental technique of analytical chemistry. It is a chromatographic technique used to separate a mixture of compounds. It is widely applied in analytical chemistry and biochemistry. HPLC has many uses including pharmaceuticals, chemicals, environmental protection, life science, and food industry, and so on.
The operation is as follows. HPLC relies on pumps to pass a pressurized liquid and a sample mixture through a column filled with a sorbent, leading to the separation of the sample components. The pressurized liquid is usually referred to as "mobile phase". The components of the sample mixture are separated from each other due to their different degrees of interaction with the sorbent particles. Different components are of different peak signals. The analysis of those peak signals will show how many kinds of components there are in the mixture.