Charged Aerosol Detection as a Versatile Tool in Modern Food Analysis: Applications, Detector Comparisons, and Future Perspectives

Charged aerosol detection (CAD) is increasingly used in liquid chromatography as a complementary detector for food compounds that are poorly suited to conventional UV or diode-array detection. This is particularly important for nonvolatile and weakly UV-absorbing food constituents, such as carbohydrates, sugar alcohols, selected lipids, sweeteners, and other technological additives. In CAD, the column eluate is nebulized, the mobile phase is evaporated, and the remaining nonvolatile particles are charged and measured as an electrical signal. This principle gives CAD a broad, mass-related response, but it also means that the detector is not fully universal. Its performance depends on analyte volatility, mobile-phase composition, aerosol formation, evaporation conditions, detector cleanliness, and calibration strategy. This review discusses the principles, analytical characteristics, and practical requirements of CAD in food analysis. It summarizes current applications in food and beverage matrices and compares CAD with UV/DAD, RI, ELSD, FLD, and MS. Particular attention is given to the strengths and limitations of CAD, including its usefulness for nonchromophoric compounds, nonlinear calibration behavior, lack of structural information, and sensitivity to nonvolatile matrix residues. Overall, CAD is best viewed as a versatile complementary detector that can broaden the analytical coverage of LC methods in food quality and compositional analysis.