Chromatography Forum

Dear all,

here is the incident:
I am using PFPD (Pulsed Flame Photometry Detector) for my works (organophosphorus pesticides analysis) and recently (2 days ago), the detector was down due to some unforeseen circumstantial, there were 3 batches of samples waiting for analysis and I can't wait for 2 more months to get the detector fixed up. Now, I notice that we have a new Agilent FPD attached to our neighboring laboratory and they able to let me transfer their detector to my GC (also the agilent GC) for use. My questions are:
1) If I switched my analysis to other detector, would it give any problems to my data? How about the data validity?
2) As the samples are collected continuously, will it be any effects to my internal quality control parameters (LOD, LOQ etc) if I change to different detector?
3) Any precaution steps that I need to take care off?
4) How should I report the data which was generated by different detector? (Any suggestions?)

Thanks and best regards.

If their GC is calibrated, why not move your column to their GC? It would be much better than moving their detector. If you move the detector, you probably need to repeat any IQ/OQ/PQ work on it.

Tnanks Dr, you are right. But even I switch only the column, the new detector (Agilent FPD) is no longer the same as my old one (OI PFPD), would it affect my data? How should I report it?

I would be cautious when looking to switch analysis from one FPD to another. We have two Agilent systems with FPD and have seen upto a 10 fold difference in response for the same compounds. The engineer from Agilent was as useful as ever, "both detectors pass their installation test so there is no fault with them". We played about with the air flow and got a closer agreement but still not perfect. Fortunately we are looking at high level analytes.

GCguy