Patent ID: 6855258

Claim:
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 at least a portion of each of the first-dimension separated sample components from the first-dimension mobile phase eluent for directly-coupled injection through a common injector into a second-dimension of the multi-dimensional chromatography system, the second dimension comprising two or more parallel second-dimension liquid chromatography columns; continuously supplying a second-dimension mobile phase in parallel through the two or more second-dimension liquid chromatography columns; serially and distributively injecting the sampled portions of the first-dimension separated sample components directly into the second-dimension mobile phases of the two or more second-dimension liquid chromatography columns, respectively; chromatographically separating at least one subcomponent of the injected sample portions from other subcomponents thereof substantially simultaneously in the respective second-dimension liquid chromatography columns, such that the two or more second-dimension mobile phase eluents from the associated two or more second-dimension columns each comprise two or more second-dimension separated subcomponents for the sampled portion of the respective first-dimension separated sample component; and detecting a property of the second-dimension separated subcomponents in the second-dimension mobile phase eluent using a flow-through detector.