High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) simulation software has long been recognized as an effective educational tool, yet we found that existing HPLC simulators are either too expensive, out-dated, or lack many important features we deemed necessary to make them widely useful for educational purposes. Here we describe a free, open-source HPLC simulator we developed that we believe meets this need. The web-based simulator is uniquely sophisticated, yet accessible to a diverse user group with varied expertise in HPLC. It features intuitive controls and indicators for a wide range of experimental conditions, and it displays a graphical chromatogram to provide immediate feedback when conditions are changed. The simulator can be found at hplcsimulator.org. At that website, we also provide a number of example problem sets that can be used by educators to more easily incorporate the simulator into their curriculum. Comments from students who used the simulator in an undergraduate Analytical Chemistry class were very positive.
Keywords: Analytical Chemistry; Chromatography; Computer-Based Learning; Graduate Education; HPLC; Internet / Web-Based Learning; Upper-Division Undergraduate.