Chromatography detector

Detectors operate based on specific principles, including optical, electrochemical, thermal conductivity, fluorescence, mass spectrometry, and more. Each type of detector has its unique capabilities and is suitable for specific applications, depending on the nature of the analytes and the sensitivity and selectivity required for the analysis.

There are two general types of detectors: destructive and non-destructive. The destructive detectors perform continuous transformation of the column effluent (burning, evaporation or mixing with reagents) with subsequent measurement of some physical property of the resulting material (plasma, aerosol or reaction mixture). The non-destructive detectors are directly measuring some property of the column eluent (for example, ultraviolet absorption) and thus affords greater analyte recovery.

Destructive detectors

In liquid chromatography:

• Charged aerosol detector electrically charged aerosol is used for the detection of non-UV-absorbing chargeable molecules, especially saccharides and lipids
• Evaporative light scattering detector evaporating non volatile solutes inside a volatile mobile phase for universal detection. used for saccharides and lipids and other non-UV-absorbing molecules

In gas chromatography:

• Flame ionization detector which uses ionizing flame to detect most hydrocarbon molecules
• Flame photometric detector which uses atomizing flame to get light emitted from specific elements to detect and quantify them
• Nitrogen Phosphorus Detector a thermionic detector with photometeric detection, sensitive specifically to nitrogen and phosphorus hydrocarbons
• Atomic-emission detector is a hyphenation between gas chromatography and atomic emission spectrophotometer for detection of elements.

In all types of chromatography:

• Mass spectrometer is in fact hyphenation between the separative instrument and a mass spectrometry instrument to get information on the molecular weight or atomic weight of the solute. In the advanced mass spectrometry technologies there is information on solutes structure and even chemical properties. The hyphenation between ultra high performance chromatography with high resolution mass spectrometers revolutionalized entire new scientific fields of research and application, such as toxicology, proteomics, lipidomics, genomics, metabolomics and metabonomics.