Engineering Advances in High Temperature GPC Instrumentation

The first GPC instrument incorporated a pump, an injection valve, a column oven and a RI detector. Quite some engineering ingenuity was required in those days to have a constant flow pump that was particularly required in GPC, where a small change in flow could cause large molar mass errors, and to have a stable RI detector at high temperature (with RI being known to have strong temperature dependency). It is interesting to notice that the very first GPC was targeted at high temperature applications. This certainly showed the importance that the knowledge of the molar mass distribution of polyolefins had in the design of new resins. This leads us on to discuss polyolefins and high temperature GPC in terms of engineering advances.

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