Silica is the most commonly used sorbent for flash column chromatography. When solvent is pumped through a column packed with dry silica you may notice it gets warm and sometimes down right hot!

In this post I will attempt to explain why this phenomena occurs.

For many chemists lab budgets, especially for consumable items, are limited.  One way of trying to stretch their lab budget is to reuse disposable flash chromatography cartridges.

In this post I will show how regardless of the cartridge brand used, repeated use of silica flash cartridges results in loss of compound resolution and fraction purity.