Development of a Graphical User Interface For Easier Overview of Historical Chromatography Data

Sammanfattning: Chromatography is a separation technique frequently used in the purication of medicinal drugs. In studies and project at the department of chemical engineering at Lund University a large amount of data have been generated through the use of their research software Orbit and their ÄKTA chromatography system. Methods have been developed for visualization of this data but there is currently no good way to have an overview of the data in their database. The aim of this master thesis was to developed a graphical user interface (GUI) in order to provide an overview of historical data generated in earlier projects as well as develop new methods for visualization and analysis. The nal version of the GUI consists of four main parts: 1) A list widget with the possibility to sort and work with data, 2) A search bar for querying a particular set of data, 3) Tabs, nine in total, with windows for plotting, 4) Push buttons for plotting data and clearing the plot windows. A pop-up window with an overview of a run can be generated by double-clicking an item in the lefthand list of the GUI. A simpler design was also considered during this project but was discarded as it became more dicult to sort between runs. The nal version of the GUI is, in large part, ready to be used but further improvements in terms of general stability needs to be considered for optimal functionality. Three new plot methods for visualizing total pool area and volume as well as a method for cycle analysis in periodic counter-current chromatography (PCC) were developed. The cycle plots gave results of varying quality; some runs showed a regular cycle patterns whereas none could be found in others. In particular, the plots for total pool area and volume could give a misleading impression due to a few large jumps in volume or area between runs, making it looks like there is little or no variation between the lower values.