High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is an important enabling analytical methodology that is used in various forms across the chemical and biochemical disciplines for a wide variety of applications, including pharmaceutical, food, environmental and biomedical analyses and studies.  It is therefore important that it also be a significant component of undergraduate education in science, especially in chemistry and biochemistry. 

Because of time and cost limitations generally associated with HPLC, most universities with large enrollment laboratory courses have avoided this technique in favor of gas chromatography.  Liquid chromatography, however, has significant pedagogical advantages over gas chromatography because students can be presented with physical and visual examples of liquid chromatographic separations and the absorbance spectroscopy utilized for HPLC detection in simple bench-top experiments.

In this project, recent advancements in HPLC technology have been utilized to introduce hands-on exercises demonstrating separations of simple mixtures in the undergraduate laboratory.   An important advancement of this project is the implementation of liquid chromatography exercises in large enrollment laboratory courses like those taught at most intermediate-sized or large universities.  This is accomplished through early instruction using illustrative bench top exercises, through application of state of the art yet affordable separations instruments and technology that allow fast separations, and through the use of multiple instruments available to each laboratory section.