How to Calculate the Height of the Valley Point Between Two Fused Peaks - Tip79

OBJECTIVE or GOAL

Welcome back to Get Empowered! In the last Empower tip-of-the-week post for Empower CDS Software, we answered a reader-submitted question and learned how to quantitate impurities against the main component. (Tip #78)

(See the link at the bottom of our post to see previous questions, ask your own question, or to provide a tip of your own!)

In this week’s tip, I’ll answer a question as a follow-up to Tip #74 on using Empower’s System Suitability option to calculate the ratio of peak to valley height when there’s a valley between the chromatographic peaks.

Question: How can we calculate the height of the valley point between two fused peaks?

Another great question.

Let me show you how it is done.

ENVIRONMENT

• Empower

PROCEDURE

1. If we recall from Tip #74, the ratio of peak height to valley height is calculated as start p/v or end p/v. The height of the relatively big peak at 1.005 minutes ends at a valley point, so Empower Software reports the end p/v. The peak at 1.192 minutes starts at a valley point so Empower reports the start p/v.

2. If we solve for valley height, the calculation would be valley height = peak height/start p/v or peak height/end p/v.

3. This is a simple peak custom field in Empower. (You can make a similar one substituting end p/v.)

4. We see the result of the calculation in the peaks table in Review. The valley height is the same regardless of which calculation we use.

It’s that easy!

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

1. We will do a series of Empower Tips on Custom Fields later this year… Stay tuned!
2. This procedure can be followed using the QuickStart or Pro interface.