Importance

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Abstract

Signals obtained in High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) are notoriously noisy. The signal can be improved by increasing the path length of the light passing through the sample, but increased path length also invites greater refraction and reflection of that light. A novel approach is to utilize a number of photocell sensors lined up along a capillary through which the solution passes. Through careful measurement and calculation, a signal for a single fluid particle can be produced by all the photocell sensors. By incorporating an appropriate delay between each signal, to take into account the finite speed of the fluid, the resulting plurality of noisy signals can be summed or statistically correlated. The signal, containing the important information about the fluid, will increase with the number of photocells used, while the noise increases by the square root of the number of photocells used. The signal to noise ratio, then, increases as the square of the number of photocells used. In this way, the effective path length is increased without including any moving parts.

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First Claim