HPLC and UPLC: operation, troubleshooting and system suitability

Analysts who operate HPLC or UPLC systems, and supervisors who review chromatographic data before release.

Assumes hands-on familiarity with the instrument. Delegates work through real chromatograms and fault symptoms during the two days.

The syllabus below is the standard shape of the course. It is adjusted to the matrices, methods and instruments you actually run, which is agreed before delivery rather than discovered on the day.

• The system

  Pump, injector, column, detector — and the failure each contributes

• Parameters

  Mobile phase, gradient, flow, temperature and how each moves the separation

• System suitability

  Resolution, tailing, plate count, repeatability — set before the batch, not after

• Peak faults

  Tailing, fronting, splitting, ghosting, drift and baseline noise, traced to cause

• Columns

  Selection, conditioning, storage and recognising a column at end of life

• Maintenance

  Preventive routines, and the faults they stop you ever seeing

Courses are written around what a delegate can do afterwards, not what was presented to them. These are the outcomes this one is built to produce.

1. 01Set and justify system suitability criteria for a method rather than copying them.
2. 02Diagnose a peak-shape fault from the chromatogram to the component responsible.
3. 03Decide whether a batch is invalid or salvageable when suitability fails partway through.
4. 04Run maintenance that prevents the recurring faults in your own laboratory.

Chromatography rarely fails loudly. It produces a peak, integrates it and reports a number, and the number is wrong in ways that look entirely normal on the report.

System suitability is the defence, and it only works if the criteria were set from the method’s requirements beforehand. Criteria chosen to accommodate the system as it currently performs are a record of what happened, not a control.

Delivered over 2 days, at your site or at the laboratory, in English or Arabic. Sessions are built around real records, real data and real failures rather than slides of clause numbers, and the people delivering them spend the rest of the week doing the thing being taught.

Group size is agreed in advance — practical sessions are capped so that everyone works rather than watches. An attendance certificate is issued to each delegate on completion.

Ask about any subject not listed here. If it is not something we teach well, we will say so rather than build it for the sake of the booking.