Quantitative determination of the components in overlapping chromatographic peaks using wavelet transform.

A novel application of the wavelet transform in retrieving the separate signals from overlapping chromatographic peaks and quantitative determination of the components in the overlapping chromatograms is described. The signals can be very easily separated by decomposing an overlapping chromatographic peak into localized contributions according to their frequency, and quantitative calculation can be done by studying the contributions of higher frequency. Overlapping peaks of two- and three-component mixtures were investigated by the method, and the results show excellent correlations between peak areas of the retrieved signals and the concentrations for all of the components.