The most commonly used measure for the performance of a chromatographic separation is plate counts.This value mainly depends on the particle size, column length and the packing quality of the column.However, plate counts are not an effective indicator of gradient separation.Peak capacity is a performance measure that describes the number of peaks that can be separated during a gradient run with a certain resolution and is one of the parameters used to evaluate the performance of a chromatographic separation.Higher peak capacity values are important because of the increasing demand for high throughput gradients for the separation of complex samples with an unknown number and variety of analytes.