Chromatography Forum

I am looking at systems and trying to work out what we need and I see that there is a lot of talk about UHPLC. You end up paying at least an extra £2K for handling the extra pressure (400-600 bar). Is it worth it? I will be developing my own methods so if for an extra £2K if I can run samples at double the speed and use less solvent it could make sense.
Any comments appreciated.

depends on your throughput. If you only run <100 samples a week and don't have to worry about the hourly cost of using the instrument, then straightforward hplc is probably enough, especially if you don't work on very complex samples where you'd like extra resolution.

If reducing your run-time from 30min to 5min appeals, either for through-put or cost, then UPLC is worth serious consideration (using shorter small-particle columns at high flow-rates). Similarly, if you regularly find you wish you had a bit more resolution then UPLC offers you the chance to keep your columns the same length, but switch to small particles for higher resolution, at the same run-time.

There is a compromise: you could look at solid-core particles, which are supposed to give the same sort of performance as proper UHPLC columns, but at lower back-pressure.

great advice lmh,

I have been very happy using core-shell particles in our lab. I think reduced run times are valuable for another reason. There is less runtime during which something bad could happen (loss of power, samples decompose, detector drift/failure) and you can see results earlier and there is a shorter turnaround time for reporting data and problems with runs will become obvious more quickly.