Dear All
I have to work with a FPD (flame photometric detector) to anlyse parathion.
Can you give me an idea of the typical sensitivities for this detector with pesticides.

Most organophosphorus pesticides are approximately 10% phosphorus. The majority of FPDs are speced at about 1 pg/sec detection limit. Assuming a 5 sec peak width, you should be able to detect parathion at approximately 50 pg on column, or 50 ppb with a 1 uL injection. The peaks at this level will probably be too small for reliable quantitation, so the minimum quantitation limit will probably be 3 to 5 times higher than the detection limit. This is just a rough estimate, and I have tried to be very conservative. Remember that there is a compound dependance on response with the FPD, so the parathion may not give as large a response as the compound used to determine sensitivity. If your FPD is speced higher or lower than 1 pg/sec, you can adjust the values above to refine the estimate.

Thanks for your advise

Was very useful as a string point