Determination of ethylene by field asymmetric ion mobility spectrometry

Peter C. Hauser,Nattapong Chantipmanee

doi:10.1007/s12127-020-00267-y

Abstract

The determination of ethylene with a field asymmetric ion mobility spectrometer, which can easily be constructed in-house, is described. The device makes use of a Krypton lamp for ionization. A rectangular pulse of 500 Vpp at 1 MHz was employed as separation waveform in the drift tube rather than the commonly used less efficient bisinusoidal waveform. The calibration curve for the range from 670 ppb(V/V) to 67 ppm(V/V) was found to be highly linear with a correlation coefficient of r = 0.9999. The limit of detection was determined as 200 ppb(V/V). The reproducibility was 4% (relative standard deviation). The device was found to be suitable for the determination of ethylene given off by fruit; 6 types of climacteric fruit were tested, namely apples, bananas, kiwi fruit, nectarines, pears and plums.

Highlights

Ethylene is an important hormone in plant life with particular relevance in the ripening of climacteric fruit [1,2,3,4,5]
The Forth programming environment employed on a MSP430G2553 microcontroller (Texas Instruments, Dallas, TX), to create the compensation voltage ramp, was the open source package Mecrisp
The graphical user interface running on the computer under the Windows operating system was written in Python

Summary

Introduction

Ethylene is an important hormone in plant life ( known as phytohormone) with particular relevance in the ripening of climacteric fruit [1,2,3,4,5]. We had a previous interest in the determination of this species [10,11,12], and inspired by a recent report by Chavarria et al [13] we wanted to investigate if this task could be addressed with an inexpensive in-house constructed ion-mobility spectrometer. (2020) 23:161–166 previous account of the determination of ethylene by FAIMS, nor by the more standard drift tube ion mobility spectrometry (DTIMS). The FAIMS instrument employed in the work detailed here features a Krypton photoionization lamp with a photon energy of 10.6 eV. It is based on a design recently reported by Chavarria et al [13], is simple and inexpensive in construction, and can be duplicated by interested parties. The mass flow controllers were operated with software provided by Bronkhorst

Results and discussion

Conclusions

Compliance with ethical standards