Some years ago when I was silly enough to have a real job in the chemical industry we were working in a regular synthetic organic lab but had to scale some of our synthetic work up considerably. This makes everything a bit complicated and time consuming. Now you can get a long way by just buying massive RBF's and so forth and as long as you can recrystallise your products everyone is happy. However, when you have to run your 250 grams of stuff down a quick flash column you have a serious problem. So we were looking for some alternative to flash column chromatography that would allow us to do so. A good friend mine at the Australian Wine Research Institute of all places told me about something he called squat columns and gave me a paper from Aldrichimica Acta on the technique:
"Dry-column" Flash Chromatography, L.M. Harwood, Aldrichimica Acta, 1985, 18, p. 25
Now this paper isn't particularly detailed so we had to mess around with it for quite a long time before we got it right but it was worth it. We were columning really large quantities of stuff this way. I spoke to my former industry colleague about it the other day and he told me that they were doing 500 gram columns now collecting 1 and 2 liter fractions in conical flasks. Anyway, we thought that it made sense to publish a paper with more detailed instructions so that someone might actually try to use it successfully. Fortunately, the referees also liked the idea so we got this paper out on the topic: Dry Column