A gated atmospheric pressure drift tube ion mobility spectrometer-time-of-flight mass spectrometer.

Identifying the compounds of an unknown gas mixture by using an ion mobility spectrometer (IMS) is a difficult task, because several ion species can be generated in the ionization process. One method to analyze the occurring peaks in an IMS spectrum is coupling an IMS to a mass spectrometer (MS). In our setup we coupled a (3)H drift tube IMS to a Bruker micrOTOF II.

Investigation of ion-ion-recombination at atmospheric pressure with a pulsed electron gun.

For future development of simple miniaturized sensors based on pulsed atmospheric pressure ionization as known from ion mobility spectrometry, we investigated the reaction kinetics of ion-ion-recombination to establish selective ion suppression as an easy to apply separation technique for otherwise non-selective ion detectors. Therefore, the recombination rates of different positive ion species, such as protonated water clusters H(+)(H(2)O)(n) (positive reactant ions), acetone, ammonia and dimethyl-methylphosphonate ions, all recombining with negative oxygen clusters O(2)(-)(H(2)O)(n) (negative reactant ions) in a field-free reaction region, are measured and compared. For all experiments, we use a drift tube ion mobility spectrometer equipped with a non-radioactive electron gun for pulsed atmospheric pressure ionization of the analytes.