Propagation of uncertainty in high-performance liquid chromatography with UV-VIS detection

The propagation of uncertainty in peak area or peak height in HPLC with UV- VIS detection, is derived in terms of injection volume, flow rate, injected concentration, retention volume and temperature. It is shown that the samp le concentration at the detector has a significant uncertainty distribution , which adds to the uncertainty of the measurement of absorbency. For measu rement of peak area and peak height, the uncertainty of the injection volum e has the greatest effect. To this is added temperature for peak height, an d flow rate and temperature for peak area. Analytical solutions are present ed for all uncertainties and are compared with data from a numerical simula tion using Latin Hypercube sampling. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science BN. All righ ts reserved.