Technical data

114 Understanding Your Agilent ChemStation
5 Quantification
What is Quantification?
What is Quantification?
After the peaks have been integrated and identified, the next step in the
analysis is quantification. Quantification uses peak area or height to
determine the concentration of a compound in a sample.
A quantitative analysis involves many steps which are briefly summarized as
follows:
• Know the compound you are analyzing.
• Establish a method for analyzing samples containing this compound.
• Analyze a sample or samples containing a known concentration or
concentrations of the compound to obtain the response due to that
concentration.
You may alternatively analyze a number of these samples with different
concentrations of the compounds of interest if your detector has a
non-linear response. This process is referred to as multi-level calibration.
• Analyze the sample containing an unknown concentration of the compound
to obtain the response due to the unknown concentration.
• Compare the response of the unknown concentration to the response of the
known concentration to determine how much of the compound is present.
To obtain a valid comparison for the unknown sample response to that of the
known sample, the data must be acquired and processed under identical
conditions.