I just, I don’t get it. There’s a mobile phase and a stationary phase, but I’m looking at descriptions of paper chromatography and it’s saying that the stationary phase is the water in the paper and then the mixture is the thing at the bottom and then it just goes up the paper and separates? But like… wouldn’t it just all go up the paper? And also how else would you do this other than paper chromatography?
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Chromatography is primarily a way to separate the components of a sample, we have various types but since you talked about paper chromatography I’ll just focus on that.
Mobile phase – the one that moves (solvents)
Stationary phase – paper or silica plate (thin layer chrom)
Now you place your sample in the starting line, place it in your chamber then let it develop. As the mobile phase creeps up it carries the sample with it. Your sample would contain different parts. Each of this parts would have different attractions to the stationary phase hence what happens is some parts separate faster/lower and some parts separate lower/higher.
Okay, we now separated our sample into its components, what now? Now you’re going to compute for the rf value. it is a number from 0-1 that describes the part of the compound. Now if you want to identify the compound, you can match the rf values with standards performed using the same parameters and if you get the same value that’s probably the compound.
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