Patent ID: 6730228
Filing Date: 2004-05-04
Classification: B01D,B01J,G01N

Abstract:
A method for characterizing a polymer sample in a multi-dimensional liquid chromatography system, the method comprising:injecting the polymer sample into a first-dimension mobile phase of a first dimension of the multi-dimensional liquid chromatography system; chromatographically separating at least one sample component of the injected polymer sample from other sample components thereof in a first-dimension liquid chromatography column, such that a first-dimension mobile phase eluent from the first-dimension column comprises two or more first-dimension separated sample components; sampling discrete volumes of the first-dimension mobile phase eluent at regularly recurring time intervals, such that at least a portion of each of the first-dimension separated sample components are sampled; injecting each of the sampled volumes of the first-dimension mobile phase eluent directly into a second-dimension mobile phase of the second dimension of the multi-dimensional liquid chromatography system; chromatographically separating at least one subcomponent of the sampled portions of each of the first-dimension separated sample components from other subcomponents thereof in a second-dimension liquid chromatography column, such that a second-dimension mobile phase eluent from the second-dimension column comprises two or more second-dimension separated subcomponents for each of the sampled portions of each of the first-dimension separated sample components; and detecting a property of the second-dimension separated subcomponents in the second-dimension mobile phase eluent using a flow-through detector.