Jan van Deemter

Jan Jozef van Deemter (31 March 1918 to 10 October 2004) was a Dutch physicist and engineer known for the Van Deemter equation in chromatography. He obtained his doctorate in physics from the University of Amsterdam in June 1950. From 1947 he worked as a researcher for Royal Dutch Shell, where he developed the equation and published his article about it in 1956. The equation relates the resolving power of a chromatographic column, expressed as the height equivalent to a theoretical plate, to the flow and kinetic parameters that cause peak broadening: an eddy diffusion term, a longitudinal diffusion term and a term for resistance to mass transfer between the mobile and stationary phases, all depending on the linear velocity of the column flow.