Determination of the correct migration time and other parameters of the Haarhoff-van der Linde function from the peak geometry characteristics

For Gaussian peaks, the migration time of the analyte results as the position of the top of the peak and the zone variance is proportional to the peak width. Similar relations have not yet been derived for the Haarhoff-van der Linde (HVL) function, which appears as a fundamental peak-shape function in electrophoresis. We derive the relations between the geometrical measures of the HVL-shaped peak, that is the position of its maximum, its width and a measure of its asymmetry, and the respective parameters a(1), a(2), and a(3), of the corresponding HVL function. Under the condition of the HVL-shaped peak, the a(1) parameter reflects the true migration time of the analyte, which may differ from the peak top position significantly. Our procedure allows us to express the parameters without the need of any external data processing (nonlinear regression). We demonstrate our approach on simulated peaks and on experimental data integrated by the ChemStation software (delivered with the CE instrumentation by Agilent Technologies). A significant improvement is achieved reading the migration time of the experimental and simulated peaks, which draws the error of the HVL-shaped peak migration time evaluation down to the resolution of the data sampling rate.