Waters celebrates 10 years of ACQUITY UPLC

On March 4th at Pittcon^® 2014, Waters celebrated the ten-year anniversary of the ACQUITY UltraPerformance LC^® (UPLC^®) System, a technology that created a new industry standard for chromatographic performance.

"In 2004, we changed the game. High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) wasn't keeping pace with business demands to analyze more samples, faster and with better results. The introduction of ACQUITY UPLC in 2004 transformed laboratory science and the analytical science industry," said Art Caputo, President of the Waters Division of Waters Corporation.

Over the last ten years, ACQUITY UPLC has had a profound effect on laboratories worldwide, both scientifically as well as from a business standpoint.  The novel ability of the ACQUITY UPLC to perform separations on 1.7 micron particle technology coupled with the ability to operate at 15,000 psi, opened new possibilities for analytical testing. The narrow, more concentrated peaks of ACQUITY UPLC improved ionization efficiency. Enhanced resolution and robustness led to high-quality, reproducible analysis in significantly less time, reducing run times by up to a factor of 10 compared to HPLC technology.  Through this increased productivity, it has been shown time and again that one ACQUITY UPLC system typically displaces multiple HPLC instruments.

Scientific impact has long been the driver for UPLC, but along the way we've also made a pretty significant environmental impact. ACQUITY UPLC has also proven to be a sustainable solution for laboratories: saving energy, using less solvent and producing less waste.  Again, in comparison to HPLC technology, laboratories utilizing ACQUITY UPLC save approximately 222 liters of solvent per year. Since switching to ACQUITY, Waters customers have saved 5.5 million liters of solvent. That's equal to eight times the volume of the Washington Monument!

Or in terms of cost, at $100 per liter, our customers have saved over a half billion dollars in solvent purchase costs. That number alone is impressive, but if you also factor in the high cost of solvent disposal, the savings reach a billion dollars or more.

Looking back a decade later, it's clear that ACQUITY UPLC Technology delivered on the Waters philosophy: that purposeful innovation can drive significant impact. In doing so, UPLC revived an industry, and led us into the new era in separations science - one that Waters continues to advance today.