Gas chromatography with selective detection is finding widespread use in a broad range of applications that cut across many segments of the petroleum, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, and food safety industries. Demand for low-level sulfur and phosphorus detection will only increase in the future as a response to more stringent environmental and quality control and regulations.

The FPD (flame photometric detector) is often overlooked when the need for low-level volatile quantitation arises in the analytical laboratory. More complex and expensive detectors such as the pulsed flame photometric detector (PFPD), atomic emission detector (AED), and sulfur chemiluminescence detector (SCD) have traditionally dominated these applications. Although these detectors are very sensitive, they require a high level of expertise for calibration, tuning, and maintenance to achieve optimal performance