Question

What are the advantages of chromatography?

Answer 1

Chromatography is one of the most versatile techniques available to a chemist (the other one being spectroscopy.) If you understand the principles of both of these techniques, you covered about 80% of standard lab instruments.

Chromatography is used for a large range of applications. It’s mainly used to separate complex mixtures. You can separate compounds based on their size, molecular weight, ionic mobility, polarity, boiling point etc. This allows us to measure the concentration of a specific compound in a mixture. Because of this, it is a widely used technique.

There are instruments that combine both chromatography and spectroscopy (GCMS, LCMS etc.) They are used from analyzing unknowns, drug testing to many others. You only inject couple of microliters into the instrument. So while it’s a destructive method (you cannot recover the sample), the generated waste is minimal.

So the advantage of using chromatography is mainly its versatility. Electro chemistry has been catching up with these techniques specially with the miniaturization of electrodes. It has the potential to become a very useful technique as well (it already is but there’s always room for improvement.) While chromatography is very useful, standard instrument is pretty big and you cannot carry it into the field. So techniques like cyclic voltammetry may be the solution for that. Each has their strong and weak points. You need to be familiar with an array of techniques and instruments to fully function in the field of chemistry.

Hope this information will help you :)

Answer 2

Here's the answer

A very small quantity of the substance can be separate
component with very similar physical & chemical properties can be separate
It identifies the different constituent of a mixture