Abstract
Ion chromatography (IC) is one of the popularly used techniques for determination of inorganic ions in a variety of water analysis market. Recently the target elements include small molecular organic acid. To achieve the simultaneously determination of inorganic ions and organic acids, the gradient elution for ion exchange separation is needed. The gradient elution has brought about various problems. Traditionally, eluents in ion chromatography are prepared off-line from reagent-grade chemicals. However, off-line preparation often introduces contaminants that can cause undesirable chromatographic baseline artifacts and even irreproducible retention times of target analytes during the ion chromatographic separation. Online eluent generation solve most of previous problems. In this paper, the principles of the online eluent generation and applications are described.
