Sequential injection chromatography against HPLC and CE: Application to separation and quantification of amoxicillin and clavulanic acid

Sequential injection chromatography (SIC) has been recently proposed as an alternative separation technique. SIC has the advantages of inexpensiveness, rapid operation procedure, small dimension, short stabilization time, friendly maintenance process and less reagent consumption. In contrast, SIC has had suffered from some limitations. In the current study, a higher pressure resistant selection valve with additional ports than that available in commercially SIC systems was installed. This development allows achieving solution propulsion without showing leakage and linking more standard/sample solutions. In addition, a new method for the separation and quantification of amoxicillin and clavulanic acid in pharmaceutical formulations has been optimized and validated. A comparative study on the efficiency of the SIC method with previous HPLC and CE methods was conducted as well. Besides the benefits of the instrumentation of SIC, the proposed method has shown some advantages over previous HPLC and CE methods with respect to reagent consumption and sample frequency. Other such analytical characters of the SIC method as resolution, peak symmetry, number of theoretical plates, linearity range, accuracy, precision and limits of detection and quantification, recorded comparable results with those obtained from previous HPLC and CE methods. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.