Regenerate or throw away?

[Guest]

I am struggling with when to put more effort into regenerating a column vs throwing away and installing a new one. I know one can just calculate the time/$ for each, but what other factors do people consider most important in this? Thanks for your comments.

[DR]

You need to consider the chances of being successful. The odds of successfully regenerating a column tend to be fairly low and the odds of the problem happening again are quite high, so I generally opt for "throw away".

[blackdrum]

This depend on many factors, such as the value of column(if you use preparative column, you will know how expensive it is), your skill, the timeline of project, ect. I don't know how you 'regenerate' column, when I find a column broken, normally I open the inlet, dig out dirty gel, and refill with gel slurry, then tighten the inlet. at first you may fail, but after several tries, you will find it is easy to get good result.

[james little]

We routinely generate Varian Polaris Embedded 50 x 4.6 columns. Usually what we note is that early peaks eluting from the column split or become distorted.

Almost always the problem is column voiding. We just open the front of the column, if a lot of discoloration, scrape off a tiny amount of material, make a thick slurry of some C18 packing (not even Polaris), take a spatula and spread across the front of the column.

Then put the column on an LC and wash with some different solvents. We have regenerated the columns 4-5 times. Use mainly for qualitative analyses. Always run a test mixture and seem to match well with original columns.

Surprised it works so well, but meets our needs.

Cheap at heart..