Our research over the past several years has focused on the high-throughput production of retention data for the purposes of fitting to the NK and other retention models . It has been increasingly evident that methods for enhancing the automation in the experimental design are critical, especially when carrying out gradient retention experiments. Our proposal for an experimental design suitable for obtaining a set of gradient experiments is outlined in Figure . The first step is to estimate whether the selected solute is weakly, moderately, or strongly retained on the selected column. We elected to use a single solute parameter and a single column parameter for this estimate. For the solute, we use the base 10 logarithm of the octanol/water partition coefficient (log10 Pow), which can be obtained from experimental data found in the literature, or estimated using one of many different structure activity relationships . We elected to use the structure-activity relationship based on a linear solvation energy relationship found on the LSER 2017 website , which provides for calculation of log10 Pow for uncharged molecules with molecular weights of less than 1000 Da. These values for the 35 solutes used here are shown in Table . For the column parameter, we elected to use the base 10 logarithm of the retention factor for ethylbenzene recorded in the widely used hydrophobic subtraction model database , where these values for the retention factor are tabulated for over 700 commercially available columns. The values for the nine columns used here are shown in Table . These While this correlation is relatively weak (r 2 = 0.542), this offers a convenient means of roughly estimating the relative retention of the target compound on the target column.